Westvleteren 12, a product of Westvleteren Abdij St. Sixtus, topped the list of 50 best beers. The beer, a RateBeer Gold Medal winner, comes from a brewery that has “the smallest output of the Trappist breweries,” and is less available than a more popular Belgian Quadrupel like Rochefort 10.

Here’s the top 10, which were determined by over 3.5 million reviews. RateBeer says that they placed more emphasis on user reviews coming from tastings that occurred in the last year.

1. Westvleteren 12 – Westvleteren Abdij St. Sixtus
2. Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter - Närke Kulturbryggeri
3. Goose Island Rare Bourbon County Stout – Goose Island Beer Company
4. Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout – Founders Brewing Company
5. Rochefort Trappistes 10 – Brasserie Rochefort
6. Bells Hopslam – Bells Brewery
7. Russian River Pliny the Younger – Russian River Brewing
8. Cigar City Pilot Series Passionfruit and Dragonfruit Berliner Weisse – Cigar City Brewing
9. AleSmith Speedway Stout – AleSmith Brewing Company
10. Deschutes The Abyss – Deschutes Brewery

Personal favorite brewery Three Floyd’s had two beers in the top twenty – Dark Lord russian Imperial Stout at number 13 and their ass-kicking Dreadnaught Imperial IPA at number 17. Another personal favorite, Southern Tier’s Choklat came in at number 40.

Craft beer is on the rise, says RateBeer in a post:

Craft beer is at a wonderful stage. No longer are we competing for respect as a second class beverage. We’ve won respect. And the craft beer industry is enjoying great success. The number of craft brewers is still increasing markedly. Last year alone RateBeer new brewers increased a whopping 16%. And RateBeer is still growing rapidly, primarily in large US metro areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York and abroad in Australia, Sweden, Italy and Brazil.

RateBeer also awarded prizes in specific categories. Munster, Indiana’s Three Floyds topped the list of best breweries in the World 2012. The best new brewers category was won by anchorage, Alaska’s anchorage Brewing Company.

Everyone knows that Digg is a popularity contest. It can still be a great place to find interesting stories, but it’s not unbiased. You have to know people (or pay them) to get your content enough Diggs to really get noticed by the community at large.

Fortunately for those trying to get a substantial amount of Diggs, the circle of friends that make up the community isn’t completely closed. It will however take some effort on your part to earn their respect and make your way up the ladder of Digg respect.

First of all, Digg’s not supposed to be about marketing, which is why if you truly want said respect, you need to take the community seriously, and actually favor them rather than yourself when submitting articles. You can’t just submit a bunch of your own content and expect it to go anywhere. You’ve got to submit appealing content and get your friends to help you digg it.

Brent Csutoras has a great article about creating a compelling profile at Search Engine Land. He breaks down eight points, which include: deciding whether or not you want to use your real identity and choosing a memorable one, choosing an avatar that works in all sizes, being careful what you link to, being active, being a good user statistically, not adding too many friends at once, and being natural.

Brent actually joined our own Mike McDonald and Internet marketing consultant Todd Malicoat in a discussion about this at Pubcon recently:

Another Search Engine Land article by Muhammad Saleem talks about some additonal points to succeeding on Digg. He talks about things like playing the different categories, obsessing over titles and summaries, using appropriate thumbnails, wooing power users, and commenting frequently. "Comments breed more comments, which ultimately means more visibility," says Saleem.

Earlier this year we covered SearchRank’s five ways to score big on Digg:

1. Remove Blog Name and/or Sections From Title: all you need is the title of the post
2. Include Appealing Descriptions (Stay Within Character Limitations): if you want to practice writing tighter copy, and you should, sign up for Twitter and practice summarizing your post in 140 characters, including a link.
3. Submit to the Most Relevant Category (Avoid Multiples if Allowed): stay on topic; to be specific, stay on one topic.
4. Stay Within The Topic of the Social News Site: SearchRank noted how sites like Sphinn and Small Business Brief cater to a dedicated niche. Your submission to these sites should do likewise. At bigger sites like Digg, keep to the most relevant category.
5. Will Others Find Your Submission of Interest? Boring only gets clicked when the facts are truly staggering; think about the recent revelations about major leaguer Roger Clemens and his friendship with country singer Mindy McBride.

I would add that stories about Digg are often popular with the Digg community as well. Probably not a story about succeeding on Digg, like this one, but ones about things that Digg is doing, why Digg is great, or what Kevin Rose had for breakfast. Digg users love Digg, so if you have a lead on something Digg-related and are the first to submit it, I would say there’s a good chance you’ll get some play within the community.

Update: I stand corrected, this story is getting a little play on Digg.

Why verify?
As an owner of community on MyBlogLog, the Verified check mark is like a “seal of approval.” This shows anyone who looks at your MyBlogLog community page that the owner of the site has an active hand in the management of the community page.

How it works
When a site owner begins the verification process, we give them a bit of code to put onto their site that only someone with edit rights to the site can put into the page. Verification happens by putting the code on your site, re-publishing, and clicking the “Authenticate” button on the verification page. MyBlogLog then goes out to the site to check for the code. If it finds it, verification is complete!

Once you complete verification, you can remove the code from your site.

What it means
The verified check-mark on a community page is an indicator that the community owner has completed the verification process. Verification can only be done by authors and co-authors of a MyBlogLog community. Community pages that have been verified will flagged as such in our database and this flag will be used in the future to provide more visibility and other special mojo powers. from MyBlogLog

To start the verification process, go to the blogs you have registered and click on the verify link under the authors section in the community page.

You have two options when verifying a website or blog:

1. Post a link with a verification code
2. Add the old faithful meta tag

Once verified, you can remove the verification post or tag.

Here is a quick shot after post or tag has been verified.

Here is the new community that has been verified.

The most interesting information was from the Official MyBlogLog Blog:

In the future, we’ll use the verified flag to indicate a higher level of “truthiness” and will use it help us better promote that site.

• What is meant by “truthiness“? Is is related to some kind of authority?
• Is MyBlogLog working to offer new ways to “better promote” and/or “provide more visibility” to websites and blogs that maintain a MyBlogLog community?
• What super “mojo powers” does Yahoo have to bestow upon MyBlogLog communities?