News Flash – People Are Gaming Digg!

News Flash – People Are Gaming Digg!

Reader Comments (19)

  1. It is in the vested interests of media sites like CNET to discredit amateur and small-scale professional producers of original content – to do otherwise would be to welcome their own destruction. I am not surprised, therefore, when CNET jumps on anything it can to try to undermine “new media.”

    That said, I think the problem arising from the Digg phenomenon is not a problem of a sudden profusion of self-serving or low-quality content on the Internet but rather a problem with poor editorial skills on the part of the general Digg user. To paraphrase what you said above, is the general public really who we want to be editorializing news? I say “no” simply on the basis of the observation that so many seem unable to discern between quality content, conscientiously produced, from content specifically intended to draw a crowd for crowd’s sake.

  2. Seeding the internet includes not only the social sites but also A-list blogs and Opinion Leaders. Seeding companies are ninja marketers. Even everyday Joes are being hired to pitch on forums and at the local Best Buy.

    According to Paul Mardsden, you could reach 90% of your market through the 10% opinion leaders.
    We did a post on this recently.
    http://tinyurl.com/yzvnhu

    I think digg is using moderators to cut down on this practice.

  3. 1750+ Diggs on the CNET story so far… and they didn’t even take down those dubious advertisements that they make money from.

    How evil… 🙂

  4. Absolutely. That site couldn’t afford to buy the type of link juice it’s getting, but instead it’s getting it delivered free of charge.

  5. Sure, it’s not new, but it makes for a good headline, wouldn’t you agree? And yes, it is Digg bait. Now you’ve seen it on CNet though, give it a couple of more months then check out the AP or Reuters wires: you’ll see the same story. Reality is that news to us like this takes months to filter through the crowd to more mainstream sites (CNet) and even longer to the MSM.

  6. I felt the same way when I read this article earlier. Where do they draw the line between “spammer” and “Internet marketer?”

  7. Every system is open to exploitation and social media networks are not different. Wikipedia too has been used quite often for generating traffic.

    As a side note: I read the CNET article yesterday after reading, I think, Rand’s post at SEOmoz. Apart from the fact that the author has her definitions wrong, she hasn’t written anything so obvious that it should have the blogging world up in the arms. It’s a technology news portal and they could be merely covering an incident. And it’s true spurious methods are used to generate links — happens everywhere.

  8. @zaibatsu – it shouldn’t matter if there are ads or not, that’s why the article is also a joke. If its good content, it’s good content! regardless of what site it’s on and whether or not there are ads on the page.

  9. The hypocrisies of that article are really absurd. Look at any magazine these days and a large portion of their revenue comes from what I’d call adverticles, supposedly news-worthy articles that are actually paid for by the subject of the article. For instance, Outside ran a group of articles on which Hawaiian island was the best, all written by names in non-fiction. 5x 1200word pieces. A cushy deal for the authors who got a couple weeks stay in Hawaii. All paid for by the Hawaiian Chamber of Commerce. And look on MSN or Yahoo. Think Borat deserved so much hype, or Jack Welch’s book on leadership, did that have to make front page news, or probably 80% of what are on portal sites these days? Laughable. Not that I support people taking a good thing like Digg and making it less useful by exploiting it to their own good.

  10. Brian, care to explain what you mean by your post? I don’t see the problem of the linked article, maybe I’m missing something.

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