when i submit content to social news sites, i usually check them at least twice over a 24 hours period to see what kind of comments they’re getting. in fact, often times, i read the title and summary of someone else’s submission and read the comments before reading the actual story.

one of the great things about the comment threads is that oftentimes when a site goes down because of the sudden influx of unexpected traffic from digg (or another social site), people point new readers to mirrors for the content so you can read and digg the story even if the site itself is unavailable. usually these mirrors point to duggmirror, coral cache, and google cache, but recently spammers have gotten wind of this tactic and have begun scraping content onto their own sites and passing them off as mirrors.

enter smith johnson (who is incidentally a 39-year-old girl):

smith has setup a blogspot blog at diggmirror1.blogspot.com (presenting a server error at the moment), and is mimicking well intentioned people by pretending to link to a legitimate mirror (i.e. duggmirror, one of the most popular mirrors for dugg sites), while actually linking to his/her own site where all the content is being scraped and reposted. i have already reported the user to digg (for posting 5 spam comments like that in the last hour) and if you come across the user, please bury the comments.

also, if you’re looking for an easy way to access unavailable content or for a way to inform your audience about mirrors, i would encourage you to look at the dugged firefox extension. the extension simply adds a link to the duggmirror page for a site that is down, right next to the submission for the site. here’s an example (notice the orange text at the bottom-left):

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, traffic, dugg, duggmirror, coral cache, google, mirror, spammers

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