• Michael Erik, MBA Quality Blog Critic http://www.qualityblogger.com “The Best Things In Life Are Free”

There are some people in these networks who think that anything from a site built with WordPress is blogspam, since…it’s a blog…thus sullying the good name of Digg. I agree with the Digg definition of middle-manning (ironic, as Digg is the internet’s biggest middle-man). Linking to something without the relevant commentary besides “hey, look at this” is virtually worthless.

Blog spam is just that.. people that use backtracks and link spamming under comments and false articles that is very nasty and serves no purpose, however on the other hand I can see exactly why there needs to be sharing or re-posting of articles to as many people as possible.

Besides creating content - there are those out there that work to distribute that content. And this is a service almost as important as the creation itself.

Hence the definition of SPAM being used in your article is incorrect (although I am aware that the vast majority agree with it). Spam is submitted with complete disregard for the potential of the market or group to care about the message. It should not be defined by the fact that the contributor may get some financial gain from the submission.

Another reason why your definition is wrong can be seen when you consider the following: - someone finds some content that is awesome - that no one has found before. By the grace of the creator, he puts it on his site - and then drives traffic to it by submitting to digg. Because it is such great content it makes it to the front page. Everyone who sees it is greatful that they did. This can hardly be called an act of spamming - because a chief characteristic of spam is that it is content that is NOT wanted by the vast majority of recipients.

If all the crap we received in our mailboxes was stuff we liked - then it would never have been called spam - or ‘junk mail’ - using the old reference.

This general movement against bloggers who distribute quality content - is actually HURTING the naturally symbiotic nature of the web - not helping.

Do sites like Infowars and PrisonPlanet meet the criteria you’ve spoken of in your opinion and is that consistant with actual Digg action / policy from?

Thanks for your time.

http://www.pollburner.com/takePoll.php?id=6a81218e8501

That’s one of those lightbulb moments for me.

I must admit I feel guilty even pointing out to my own friends, “Oh I blogged something about our mutual interest X, that I think you’d really like.”

I guess for every spammer, there’s plenty of us that feel enough self-doubt that we shrink back too far from any kind of promotion of ourselves or our work.

As for Digg/Reddit, well if your tastes differ from the tastes of the majority, then voting will never identify what you’d most like to have highlighted to you.

What we need is somehow just the votes of people that share our tastes and interests. And in a way, that’s what a blogroll is, isn’t it?

I also find Delicious is useful. The stuff that is bookmarked by people who marked the same pages I did is usually a great source of really interesting material.

Maybe someone can figure out a way to combine our blogrolls and our Delicious tagging patterns to find people that like what we like, and then flag what they rate highly to us.

Heck, that’s a great idea for a Web 2.0 business.

I almost want to not tell you, and instead go do it myself.

Then, how come that special youtube video is being branded as original? What if someone sucked the video off from google-vid or some other site that previously hosted it, uploaded it to youtube and included a subliminal message that prompts the viewer to visit a specific site/page once the video finishes! Isn’t that kind of a spam too?

Blatantly…I don’t think blogspam can be granted such a ubiquitous status

Secondly, I agree that the charm of sites like digg/reddit is going down by the day. I go to these sites to get the ‘best of the web’ … now if you create something that qualifies in that category but it doesn’t get discovered, then the whole community missing out. I strongly agree that people should be allowed to submit their content (truly original ofcourse) and not be flamed or frowned upon. I hope we fix this so that the people with original stuff can be comfortable sharing their content; i think this will encourage a lot of digg/reddit readers to come up with ‘original stuff’ of their own and contribute in this wonderful web community. Bill, i agree with “The reality is, most of the new crop of Redditers and Diggers are happy to read tripe and stare in wonder at yet another snowflake, without caring where the content is hosted”. However, it only takes one idiot to ruin a thread and then, all we see is people flaming each other rather than discussing the actual content. Hence, we do need a place where promoting personal content is welcomed.

But perhaps you’re right about the word impartial; I should have used “untainted” or something to that effect. You should go hang out at Slashdot, by the way — they’re short a few negative people.