Who are the Top Digg Diggers?

A surprised friend asked me yesterday “You don’t know who Muhammad Saleem is?!!”. Well I did not know till writing this. Muhammad Saleem is a web celebrity of sorts by being a top 3 Digg Digger! Have you wondered who the Top Digg users are?

Digg is a powerful social bookmarking network where top stories featured on Digg front page can get huge site traffic (and crashed servers!). Old time Digg users will remember there was a Top Diggers page at digg.com/topusers, however, it was discontinued and now the page redirects to Digg blog notice that tells why the Top Diggers page was discontinued.

“Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg. These users have been listed on the “Top Diggers” area of the site that was created in the early days of Digg when there was a strong focus on encouraging people to submit content. The list served a great purpose of recognizing those who were working hard to make Digg a great site, as well as a way for new users to discover new content. Now, as the site has matured and we regularly get 5,000+ content submissions per day, we believe there are better ways to discover new friends based on your interests and what you’re digging.”

Whatever the reason be, cheating and gaming Digg is not easy. Then people discovered new ways to track the Top Digg users. Here is the list of Top 100 Diggers, updated daily using publicly available information by Christopher Finke. If you want more, they also have a list of top 1000 Digg users. It is also interesting to note why the Digg owner Kevin Rose is not a Top Digger.

Top 5 Digg Diggers

The top 5 Digg users according to the list are
MrBabyMan – Mr Baby Man (Andrew Sorcini)
digitalgopher – Digitalgopher
msaleem – Muhammad Saleem
zaibatsu – Zaibatsu
supernova17 – Karim Yergaliyev

I checked out their websites and found Muhammad Saleem reflects on the race to cross 1000 in popularity. Incidently 3 of these top 4 users Mrbabyman, Msaleem and Zaibatsu also run a weekly podcast called The Drill Down.

Top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon (Top StumbleUpon Stumblers) are powerful people in the blogosphere. They know the tricks of promoting great stories on the front page of these popular sites, have a huge friend and fans base and can send huge free traffic. Many bloggers associate and become friends and fans of these web celebrities in hopes of getting some free traffic. These users are often offered lucrative job offers -like the first 10 Netscape Navigators did.

How many top Digg users do you know?