The best time to submit to Digg and Reddit
For the blogger, making the front page on Digg or Reddit presents major impacts. It will bring in a tidal wave of traffic, several external links, a little fortune in adwords revenue and ultimately, crank up the page rank and consecrate the lucky author as the authority of a given subject. The initial wave is nice but it is the recurring traffic that makes websites lively.
Because of all the benefits of being reddited or dugg, it is not uncommon for a blogger to craft some of his posts in order to optimize his chance to make it to the front page on those popular news sites. There are even strategy guides to help him do that. One advice that is often given is to pick your submission time wisely. The idea that the submission time has an impact on the probability of making the front page appeals to common sense but it is supported by very little experimental data. Here I will describe a simple scheme to measure the activity patterns of social news websites.