Last week, my entry about Unfortunately Placed Ads gathered over five thousand diggs, with no effect on this site or the server.

Why am I not happy about this?

Because it wasn't really my article that got dugg. Someone else, a Google Ad Farm called Oddee, swiped what little work I did collecting the ads. They took about half the ones I collected, downsized some to the point of unreadability, put their ad-infested page on digg and watched the ad revenue pour in.

I noticed this about 7 hours after the article hit the digg front page. It was the top dugg article at that point. I made a post in the digg discussion, thanking them for swiping my work, and lo and behold, a short while later they edited their post to include "sources"; six links that looked like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6. If you clicked #5, you came to my article. The other 5 were pictures that had been posted by digg users in the thread there. They linked to the same pictures that were embedded in the page.

From this tiny link, over 4000 people came to my site. I estimate that they had over a hundred thousand visitors from digg.

Has anyone had similar experiences? How did you deal with it? What is it even called, digg fraud? Blog spam? Intellectual property theft? Some hideous combination of the three?

I admit, I'm a little bitter about this. I know that the content I put on this site is a mixed bag, and that not every post is interesting to everyone. But the Unfortunately Placed Ads article seemed to be universally popular, and I feel like I've been robbed of the rewards for it - I'm not making money with this site, I'm strictly talking about vanity and attention here. I don't even begrudge oddee their business model or anything. But if they want to collect stuff from the web, they should not just take someone else's collection.

And now, I'm going to take the images from the digg thread and oddee that aren't in my article yet and I'll add them to my post. Just because I can.

This screenshot taken by digg user VenDrake sums it up pretty well:

irony++

PS: I have an RSS feed now. Look in the right column!