Starship Asterisk*

Just a note to the APOD editors that I received an email surrounding the erroneous counts being sometimes reported underneath each NASA APOD.

Using my photo from last week as an example - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090320.html - one sees 55 digg hits and yet the same photo on the digg website has 489 digg hits (see http://digg.com/search?section=all&s=portara ).

I do not know the cause of this discrepancy but I suspect it may be an interest to Drs. Bonnell and Nemiroff.

(My thanks to the fellow who sent me email alerting me of this inconsistency.)

So far as I understand, the Digg count on an APOD page only relates to one submission of that APOD to Digg -- the one linked directly from that APOD. Others may submit an APOD page to Digg, even one that has already been submitted. Each entry then tallies its own Digg count. Many times a non-APOD linked APOD has made it to the front page of Digg and thus gathered many more DIggs. I believe that has happened yesterday and even the day before. For example, see:
http://digg.com/space/Martian_Dunes_and ... unity_APOD
versus
http://digg.com/space/Martian_Dunes_and ... pportunity
Note that the DIgg count on the APOD page matches only the first Digg link.

I have emailed Digg in the past asking for all the Digg links to an APOD page to be combined, but was told that was not yet possible but that Digg was working on it. I hope this is a help!

- RJN