How to get dugg and eventually get read?

Speaking as a Digg user who just submitted an article that got over 1,000 diggs, I would say the most important thing is building a strong network of Digg users who follow your activity. You will make more friends if you are an active user of the site, as opposed to only using it when you're trying to promote your own blog.

Ask Ben. :-)

I’ll probably sound dumb, but… who would that be?

That’s the founder of Fluther. Yesterday a whole gang of diggers came to fluther which overloaded the servers. So if you want traffic, you can get it ;-)

Seriously, I was making a joke. Sorry, Ben :-)

Well, personally, I’ve never had one of my own articles hit the frontpage, but I’ve submitted quite a few articles of other people of which (at the time of writing) 38 hit the front page. What I mostly do is just quote the introduction of the article when I submit it to Digg (I use the “Digg this!” Firefox extension which allows me to select a text, then right click and select “Digg this!” and then that will be used as description). The secret to popular stories is mostly a catchy headline and introduction.
While I often have troubles creating catchy headlines, there are a few things to keep in mind for writing a catchy intro. The most important one is “make it short”. It has to fit in Digg’s description and shouldn’t take the reader to long to read. People want to quickly decide whether they want to read the rest of an article, so they won’t be encouraged by long-winded intro’s.
Then you should make the reader curious. Read it over yourself and see if it would get you to read it. Use lots of adjectives and adverbs to give the user a feeling of the story.

Also, break your text up in little bitesize peaces. Use paragraphs, and dress up your text using (relevant) images.

Furthermore, I suppose it’s useful to have previous articles having hit the frontpage, because that makes people add you as friend (be sure to turn of shouts, they’re annoying) who are then able to easily track what you submit. On the other hand, I believe Digg’s algorithm also makes it more difficult for stories submitted by “more popular” members to hit the frontpage.

Wew, that was quite an answer. Let’s Digg it :P

Edit: Done! :P

Oh, and as for the catchy headline: including one or more of the words “Digg, Ubuntu, Linux, Kevin Rose, etc.” always helps ;-)

Also, I have my little own theory regarding the “Digg this” button on your website. I think it may make the chance of your story hitting the front page smaller because it is more likely to be submitted by someone who doesn’t really go through the trouble of giving your story a good description.