The milestone, albeit a minor one, was reached this morning with his submission of a Computerworld article headlined: "10 broken technology ideas - and how to fix them."
Those of you who spend much time or too much time on social-bookmarking news sites - Digg, in particular - are familiar with the name Zaibatsu, because his submissions are such a fixture on the front page of the site that one might suspect the forum is his personal blog. (I'm told 1 in 5 Network World readers use Digg, too.)
According to his user profile, Zaibatsu joined Digg on Dec. 6, 2004 and 1,064 days later he offered submission No. 3,000 to the Digg community, that piece from Network World's sister site about broken technology.
You don't need a calculator to see that's about three submissions per day, every day of every week, month and year. (Go ahead and grumble "get a life," but everyone has their obsessions and this community is considered significant/influential enough to reportedly be coveted by the likes of Google and Microsoft, although Digg has tried to douse the latest acquisition rumors.)
And it's not the number of submissions alone that makes Zaibatsu's achievement notable this morning; others have submitted far more stuff: No, it's his batting average, if you will, that sets him apart. On Digg, you see, anyone can submit anything they please, but only a select handful of Diggers have the clout and mastery of the mysterious Digg algorithm to push a significant percentage of their submissions to the top of what is an enormous mountain of continuously churning material - stories, blog posts, pictures and videos - that are submitted at any given moment 24/7.
It's making the Digg front page - or going "popular" - that sets the Zaibatsus of the world apart from the typical Digg user, who is generally pleased as punch to make the front once in a blue moon.
Zaibatsu? Of his 3,000 submissions, a full 1,196 have gone popular: That's 40 percent, or Ted Williams territory (Williams .406 batting average in 1941 being, as every baseball fan knows, the last over .400 for a season).
By the way, I don't know much about Zaibatsu the human being, but the word itself, according to Wikipedia, refers to "industrial and financial business conglomerates in the Empire of Japan, whose influence and size allowed for control over significant parts of the Japanese economy from the Meiji periods until the end of the Pacific War."
Sort of like Zaibatsu controls Digg.
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Quit juicin him up, your
Quit juicin him up, your going to give him a big head, ha ha. Reg is good and deserves to get noticed, but there are diggers out there with a much higher percentage than him, and that is astounding considering the annoying algo changes recently. Good article btw, forgot to mention that.
There isn't anyone in particular that controls Digg, it is a monster of its own. However, there are the "three amigos" ,as I call them, and they do have some influence. Unfortunately, not enough to make Jay and Kevin pay more attention to the other contributors on Digg, but oh well.
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