• Learn Something New Every Day
• Advice for Students: How to Write Research Papers that Rock!
• Get More out of Google Reader

Although I don’t normally pay much attention to article ratings on digg, being new on lifehack.org I wanted some way to assess my performance and diggs are a fair enough measure. So I’ve been watching my diggs, and I’ve been pleased to see my posts getting 60 or so diggs apiece (the average post on lifehack.org seems to get much fewer diggs). I know that counting diggs is a measure of a fairly selective segment of our audience, but it’s nice to see this little bit of recognition.

But then, my post on writing research papers — hardly the most interesting topic, I’d've thought — got over 1500 diggs! At some point, it was even on the front page! Not bad for a post that — given the comments on lifehack.org and on digg — was hated by quite a lot of people. Who knew research papers were such a hot topic?

So that was an interesting experience. I had to tell myself quite a bit that, however harsh some of the comments were, at least 1500 people liked the post well enough to digg it. What I’m realizing since I’ve been writing at lifehack,org is that I seem to have a talent for writing the kind of post that digg readers like to read — and I seem to do it without thinking about it all too much. It’s not the only kind of writing talent (and I’d like to think not the only talent I myself have!) but given the power digg wields over web traffic, it’s a nice talent to have.