It's all about AOL today. The company, which has a growing and some might say unsettling image as a PR disaster, is being publicly called out by Web Diggers (as in those who dig Digg.com) for
"spamming" their beloved site. Digg.com, for those who don't know, is a site where users tag (or Digg) articles across a variety of categories, so users can see the most popular links of the day,
week, or month in a given category. For example, this author peruses Digg.com for the most popular stories in the "technology" category every day; that's how he found this story. Many of Digg's
regulars think Weblogs Inc., which is part of AOL, posts its own stories on Digg and then tells its staffers to "Digg" them, thus inflating their popularity--much like the accounting fraud that
inflated AOL's valuation pre-merger with Time Warner. The skeptics point out that there's no way to be 100 percent certain about this, but they say it looks to be the case. The article points to
patterns seen over and over again. If these people are just friends, why are 90 percent of submissions from the same network? The story provides a screen shot showing the users' "Digg" picks, and they
all seem to have "dugg" the same stories--and they come from the same company.
Read the whole story at DiggforLife »
