I read the article at the Wall Street Journal - care of TechCrunch's Digg Rock Stars post - and was surprised at the variety of influencers, from a 12 year boy, Adam Fuhrer (on one end) to Cliff Worthington, a 45 year old English Teacher in Osaka, Japan.

How the WSJ determined the top "Diggers" by influence?  Semantic Analysis and posting activity (the right way) using a platform called "Dapper".

"…To find the key influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted through snapshots of the sites' home pages every 30 minutes over three weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community."

I had heard of Dapper before, but never used it.  I just looked at the 5 minute Demo and I'm wondering if it's similar to the new Yahoo! Pipes - not sure.  But at any rate, the Wall Street Journal got the top Diggers based on their posting behavior and topic analysis - more than just the list of top Diggers that now dissipeared from Digg (last week).  Here's what the WSJ found:

"…Though it can take hundreds or thousands of votes to make it onto the hot list at these sites, the Journal's analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named "STONERS" — in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio — was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner's AOL unit and operates a news site.)"

"….Last week, Digg took a more dramatic step, pulling down the user rankings that had served as a prod to people on the site to post their best findings. "It became a target for those trying to manipulate the system," Mr. Adelson says."

And then the WSJ goes on to profile the 30 Top Diggers and you can read about it in the WSJ article - but I want to highlight further research I've done on the profile of those same Top Diggers using QuantCast and AdLabs - and I may spend a couple of posts on this - don't know where it will take me - but my Web Analyst curiosity is engaged.

First, let's take the first Digger in the WSJ article -

PAMELA DREW/"Pamela Drew"

POSTS ON: Newsvine
WHO SHE IS: A mother of three in New York
HOW SHE DOES IT: She spends at least two hours a day looking for stories about genetically modified foods, which she says isn't covered enough in the media. Her opinionated articles have fueled her reputation; 272 of her postings have been particularly well-received.

Put that url in Quantcast and here's what I get!   Not much on her url - but all the urls of influencer's on NewsVine!

newsvine.com	100.0%
newsguru.newsvine.com	14.6%
disembedded.newsvine.com	2.2%
ispy.newsvine.com	2.2%
djin.newsvine.com	1.7%
rase.newsvine.com	1.7%
ryanmeehan.newsvine.com	1.5%
rossgram.newsvine.com	1.4%
paperdragon.newsvine.com	1.4%
killfile.newsvine.com	1.3%
stacym.newsvine.com	1.2%
forex.newsvine.com	1.1%
stevenwandrews.newsvine.com	1.1%
kevinb66.newsvine.com	1.0%
ryanbooker.newsvine.com	1.0%
thelevithorntonexperience.newsvine.com	0.8%
thehardmiddle.newsvine.com	0.8%
ardith.newsvine.com	0.7%
chaosesper.newsvine.com	0.7%
barry253.newsvine.com	0.7%
primarysources.newsvine.com	0.6%

When I started looking at these urls (above); particularly NewsGuru.newsvine.com I got a pump of Brittney Spears filth - but people must like it:  These were the keywords that made NewsGuru popular.

britneys crotch shots	7,652
britneys crotch	5,551
britney spears crotch pic	4,667
crotch shots	3,785
britney spears crotch shots	2,903
britney spears crotch pictures	2,207
britney spears crotch	1,860
britney	1,131
sams club	520
britney spears	510
ebay	245
myspace	200
myspace.com	173
google	141

Now, I'm not saying Pamala Drew has anything in common with Newsguru - but it's amazing what you can pick up with some free tools - and if that power is harnessed - I bet there's all kinds of things you can do with it - as the Top Diggers are doing now, weather they realize it or not ….. see below:

"….An English teacher in Osaka, Japan, he mentioned the box projects on a popular Web site called Digg.com<
font style="background-color: #ffff00">. Soon, supplies of the rivets needed to make them sold out at MrMcGroovys.com.

"It would have taken me a year to sell that many rivets," says Andy McGrew, owner of Mr. McGroovy's, which offers free blueprints for the homemade pirate ships and other projects.

See what I mean …. the new influeners wield enormous power - the power has been put in the hands of the enthusiasts. 

Just think of what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a former architectural client of mine  doubled search engine traffic, doubled paid traffic, and yet their sales had only gone up a little bit.  A deep dive into current client with a similar customer based showed an interesting point and I covered it near the bottom of the post titled More Buzz on Google's Personalized Search Results:

"…Recently, I did a deep dive in the customer base of a client and found it was mostly DIRECT (no search engine referral) from local Real Estate agencies or Developers.   Search probably had almost nothing to do with acquisition of these clients - it was all about the BRAND.

Before we worry about Personalized Search …. maybe we ought to look first to see we even have the right advertising and marketing vehicle, because PPC does not really suit many of the businesses that are using it (because they can't get enough traffic any other way).

In the case of my client, advertising and contacting professional associations would probably yield a lot better results, and perhaps, vertical search advertising in building and construction directories, or even Pet and Dating sites, might yield better results."

I'll follow up more on the top influencers Digg in the next couple of posts.