Just a Whole Bucket of Cute!

Today's Digg leader is a blog post about a picture of small dog with his foot stuck in an empty roll of toilet paper. Check out the picture below:

Here's why it works:

1) Cuteness: For whatever reason, people don't tire of looking at cute or funny pictures of domesticated animals. Not only do they work well around the internet -- just look at the success of I Can Has Cheezburger? -- but they work well on Digg. Of course, cuteness is a subjective measure, but as long as you stick with small dogs and cats you should be okay.

2) Picture: This seems to be the most frequently cited reason for success of a story on Digg. It's because pictures convey a lot of information in an extremely short period of time (relative to a textual description of a picture). Digg users, like all other Internet users, have very short attention spans, and are probably viewing dozens of pages in one sitting. This means you need to grab their attention and convey as much information as possible to convince them to Digg your story -- a function that the use of pictures works very well for.