As I was misrepresenting this news story on Digg as a story about Colin Farrell (it turns out, the guy just looks like him), it came to me that this would be a cool way to manipulate Digg.

Say your site, and another site, were competing with the same content to get digged first/the most. This is often the case with news organizations since they cull most of their news off the syndication feeds.

If you wanted to make sure your competition’s story didn’t rise on Digg, you could just make sure that the moment it is posted, you digg it first with an incorrect title and description (something no one would ever click on). Since you can’t submit the same URL twice to digg, it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to correct the reference. Then you can digg your own story on the same topic, and if you can get the diggs, you will rise to the top of the digg mod swarm.

Anyhow, I’m not suggesting anyone take advantage of Digg in this way, but it looks like there is a slight crack in their moderation scheme. I think I’ll have to coin the term ‘diggbaiting’ to describe this exploit

UPDATE: Here’s an article toting the end of Digg, partly because of the factors I’ve mentioned. Oh, Digg. Everyone is teaming up on you today. Time to cache out, Kevin (Rose)