UPDATE 2 @ 1600: Seems like spammers aren’t the only ones to get to the front page –  a phisher’s attacks were recently published, including email addreses, and passwords to MySpace accounts last night.  Looks like the absence of checks and balances has led to severe privacy violations if the story is true.

So to any readers who have been with blog for any length of time, you’ll recognize that one of my favourite punching bags topic, is how Digg says its doesn’t have a cabal of editors when it secretly does. In principle I understand why they say this — they have a button no other social bookmarking site does, and that’s the “bury” button. Sure, it creates problems (a la “Bury Brigade”), but I suspect its purpose is to allow individuals to police Digg itself.

If a site is crap for whatever reason, fine — bury it. In theory, it allows Digg to prevent itself from being “gamed” and all kinds of things — provided the Diggers don’t want to be gamed in the first place.

However, its not perfect — even with Editorial (Spam killing) back up. As Jason Calacanis and Mat Ingram said yesterday, all kinds of crap get through to main stream media all the time, even with proper editors.

Having said that, I think its time for Digg to reconsider its policy, in light of Nial’s Kennedy’s work that shows Spammers are getting the upper hand on social bookmarking sites — and in particular, Digg [I agree -- its the "must read" of the day].

He discovered that over the weekend a splogger got a post to hit the front page. As of its current counting that’s over 800 diggs. Nial found this out through a bunch of methods, but you can clearly see that his “Geek’s Way to Losing Weight” is clearly out of place on the blog which if flogging dental products and dental resources.

I think this has to be a call for Digg to change its ways and employ some better method of control. Unlike mainstream news media, when ‘mistaken’ news items get coverage it rarely leads directly to more sales for the target of that news coverage — but as I’ve mentioned in the past, when you game Digg there are direct financial benefits, and they are not insignificant. Even if you calculate the “opportunity savings” through an equivalent amount of Adwords placement, how much do you think 70 - 100 000 uniques over 24h is going to save?

Its easy to do the math — at a minimum of 0.05 per click, that’s $5000 for 100 000 uniques.

That’s money, man!

And of course, that doesn’t take into account the cash they’re directly making from adsense that’s splashed on to their site, or the signups from their affiliate programs.

Digg’s lack of editorial control is allowing spammers, sploggers, floggers, and goggers to not just take advantage of a system, but game it for MONEY.

And as Nial’s article ends, he makes a good point that Jason Dowdell mentioned off blog a few months ago — what happens when top diggers sell their accounts for cash? Behind the scenes? Everyone knows that the likelihood of top digger’s submissions to reach the frontpage, independent of content, is higher — because of the algorithm (although recent changes made this tougher).

Bottom line is that Nial’s work has shed some stark light on what many of us haven’t had the time, balls, or energy to prove: spammers are making money off of Digg. Digg’s “bury” button isn’t quick enough to prevent front page spam from occurring, and spammers are cashing in. Digg should formalize some way of error checking now that its gotten to be a huge traffic machine, and it shouldn’t rely on Diggers to do this — for the simple reason that many of them do not read what they are digging. Sad — but true. Muhammad at themulife has been beating this drum for a long time.

Digg shouldn’t be cool with this – and its time someone challenged them on taking some responsibility for it.

UPDATE 1: Thanks to Steve for letting me know; Digg’s bury brigade has buried the hell out of this post in less than 90 minutes. Nice!