What is really Digg and what about the Digg Effect?

I have not been using Digg as much as I probably should have. According to a lot of people I have been in contact with, Digg can bring you a lot of traffic if you use it right. I am not sure how to actually use it right, but as with most social networks it´s all about having the right content in your posts and a topic that people really digg. The more people who digg it the more traffic you will get, it both looks and sounds rather simple. My experience tells me that it´s not as easy as it seems. Can everybody use Digg to get more traffic to their website? First of all, you got to be a member to add a post to Digg. You can either add your own posts or another member of Digg can add your post. If your post is interesting enough, people will start to vote on it, and the more votes (diggs) the more traffic you will get. My first problem with Digg was that I couldn´t find the relevant categories for my articles, and if you digg your own articles in order for others to see them (and for others to digg them as well) you have to place them in the right categories. If you use "the wrong" category, it might be considered as spamming. According to Wikipedia,

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

No wonder why it was so hard at first to find the right categories for my articles. My blog is about Internet marketing, and Digg had an emphasis on technology and science articles. But at the moment that I am writing this, digg has the following main categories available: Technology, Science, World & Business, Sports, Entertainment and Gaming. The times when I digg my own articles (no more than once a week) I will use the World & Business category. I find it a little difficult using Digg compared to StumbleUpon. Digg has only two relevant categories for people writing about Internet marketing, and that´s Technology and World & Business, while StumbleUpon got many categories. If your post is of any interest to members of Digg, you might experience some traffic, if you are really fortunate you might even experience the Digg effect. What is the Digg effect? As far as I know, the Digg effect is also known as the Slashdot effect and it means the same. "The Slashdot effect is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic." What happens with the Digg effect is that if enough people Digg your website, you might experience so much traffic that your site will slow down or temporarily close. Well, I have never experienced that, but I have actually heard of people receiving more than 100,000 unique visitors in 24 hours from Digg (not sure if this is true though). If you really want to prepare for the Digg effect, there are a few things you can do. There are Ten things you should know about the Digg effect and instructions about Surviving the Digg effect. But again, I believe that to experience any effect from Digg or any other social network, you need great content in a topic that a lot of people are interested in. Visit www.digg.com and register as a member.