That's how stories on Digg become popular: they attract "crowds" in the form of Diggs. And you can tell which stories are attracting the biggest crowds by utilizing the Cloud View feature.

With the Cloud View, you only see the titles of the articles that have been submitted to Digg. The titles that are growing in popularity have a larger font than the rest. The titles with tiny fonts have tiny crowds.

Another feature is Digg Spy. This allows you to "spy" on the activity at Digg by giving you a real time view of everything as it happens.

Or you can utilize one of the Digg Labs called Digg Stack. This also shows you what is happening in real time with up to 100 stories at once. The difference is that this service stacks the stories as they grow in popularity.

The second lab service is Digg Swarm. This shows posts as circles and groups them by user. When a story is dugg, the swarm around that post grows and groups with other stories dugg by that same user.

Maybe you don't care about everything that happens, though. If you're not interested in a particular category, you can remove it from your view. You can also set a category as your default within your Manage Topics section of your member profile.

By understanding these features, you're able to see which stories are attracting the most attention. By joining the crowd and adding a comment of your own, you know lots of people will be exposed to your message. And within that message, you get to include a link to your site which could result in lots of traffic for you.

Understanding the social aspect of Digg is also critical to your traffic generation efforts. Within your user profile, you have a Manage Friends section. This is where the social aspect really comes into play.

In the friends area, you can Invite Friends or see a list of People Who Have Befriended Me. Here you can view articles your friends have Dugg. If two or more of your friends Digg the same article, it's moved to a category labeled Agreed On.

You don't have to know people to consider them friends. If you find you enjoy reading comments from certain users who seem to have the same tastes and interests, you can invite them to be your friends.

And if you want to find out who has you on their friend's list, enter your user name in the Digg Friends Checker. It will tell you who considers you a friend.

Having friends helps especially if you don't have much time. By reading the articles they Digg, you can just go straight to those articles without spending your time sifting through the numerous new articles posted daily.

Likewise, you can help your friends by digging articles. They trust you and so visit your favorite articles. Just make sure that some of your favorite articles are your own.