While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and how stories and links spread throughout the web community. Once a link "goes popular" and is listed on Digg's homepage it is seen by many and perhaps even a majority of web geeks. Very often these readers have their own blogs, and if they like a story they may blog about it or link to it. This is why many webmasters yearn to be Dugg -- not for the first wave of traffic, which is often substantial but hard to retain, but for the viral wave of traffic and links that comes as a result.

Plenty of research has been done via Digg's API to study how stories make the homepage. We know the best time to submit to Digg, and we know the best categories and types of stories (e.g. top lists, how-tos and stories about Digg), but what has never been studied before is what happens after a link goes popular.