Okay, so I’ve been accused of spamming Digg, and I’d like to address it. Now, its just one guy for the most part (DiggNazi2), but the thing is, I agree with him.

Okay, if Digg is a community of very specific articles, and the sole purpose of Digg is to get articles on the front page, then yes, what I did was exactly that, spamming. My thinking was that Digg was a community of links to items, whether they be great or simply links. You aren’t spamming del.icio.us if you use it for personal purposes, and that’s what I was doing.

I recently heard that Digg added some new features to its “include digg news on your site” feature, and I thought, “Wow, I can use this feature to create a decent front page for this site. This site contains several blogs, and I’ve long wanted a tool to include all the articles on the front page, while ranking them according to what people found interesting.

My plan: Submit my posts to Digg, and have the other bloggers do the same. Create a second account that listed all of the authors as friends, and use Digg’s tools to post all of that person’s friends on my homepage, with them being ranked properly according to popularity.

The whole idea is a bust. Digg doesn’t rank them, it just shows you the latest, in reverse order, like an RSS feed. I’m quite dissapointed, and I guess I’ll have to keep looking. I’m too illiterate in these things to design a system (although I’m learning).

So, since I was submitting all these URLs to Digg, just to use their backend, DiggNazi2 has accused me of spamming. He’s probably right, since everything I added was appearing within all of Digg’s submitted URLs. I wish there was a way to submit URLs as “private”, so I could use the backend, and not mess up all the people who are serious Digg users. For that, I apologize, and unless Digg adds a “private” feature, I’m basically done with it.

Moving on, there is a pretty good Digg clone called Pligg. If anyone can walk me through installing it, I’d really appreciate it.

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.