Which is better, Digg or Reddit?

If you reached this blog entry via one of the above-mentioned services, then I hope you won't mind the fact that you are part of a little experiment to see which of the two sites, part of the contemporary social bookmarking phenomenon, is more effective at publicizing a story.

This is not much more scientific than the old "my Commodore 64 is better than your Spectrum" debate (though we all know the answer to that, right!), just a little ad-hoc poll to see, in terms of pure visitor numbers, which of the two services, Reddit or Digg is "better".

The experiment was launched by publishing the "story" to my blog and then simultaneously (or as near as...) submitting the story to both services, at a time of significant net activity (about 16.00 GMT). Digg additionally allows the submitter to add a comment, so it seems reasonable to use this facility and add the description, "An experiment to see which of the two sites, part of the contemporary social bookmarking phenomenon, is more effective at publicizing a story.", since this might be a key advantage of Digg's.

After a 24-hour period, I will examine server logs to ascertain which service sent the most visitors.

Once again, I hope you won't see this as abuse of these services, or as a bit of cheap publicity for my blog (perish the thought). It is intended to provide a useful bit of data for publishers thinking about which services to use in publishing their news stories. And I hope the final result, to be published after the 24 hour period is up, will actually amount to a proper news story!

You can either keep your eyes glued to Digg or Reddit's "new/upcoming" pages, or you can subscribe to the Future-Phobia feed to find out the results.