Dave Cohn of NewsAssignment.net, Propeller Scout, sometime-contributor to Wired, AKA “DigiDave”, and all around Social News Dude has written an interesting post about Digg today, with respect to people gaming Digg.  I have to admit I don’t really follow Digg all that closely these days.  But I did more than a year ago … writing about how people were trying to game Digg.

Anyway, folks like Dave Cohn provide an interesting and important perspective because they have access to the inner “circle” of socially active submitters that most people aren’t usually privy to.

And I use the word “circle” deliberately, because the gist of his piece is that the relatively new “social network” aspect of Digg is propelling (pun intended) the use of instant messaging systems to promote their stories.  The worry, of course, is that the quality of the stories will suffer as what reaches the front page has more to do with the size and effectiveness of these self-promoting circles, than the actual quality of the stories themselves.

What I do wonder, however, is if this is really “gaming” Digg at all.

Last year, when stories about Digg gaming were running rampant the first time (and really, possibly the last time, as I wonder if anyone really cares as much these days), Jay Adelson was questioned about the effect of having “friends” as a function on Digg enabled this kind of “circle-digging” effect.  His answer, as I recall, was that he and Kevin wanted people to make friends, and to have people voting en bloc was an inevitable consequence of that.

Irrespective of whether or not there is a sophisticated “social network” engine behind something like Digg or not, when something like Digg gets big enough, there are real gains to gaming the system.

Front page Diggs get thousands of hits.  But that flash in the traffic-pan is almost immaterial.  What’s more important is that they also get dozens, perhaps hundreds of new backlinks in the process.  Now that Google is putting the smack down on  paid links (and paid reviews), easy “cheap” methods of generating organic links are getting harder and harder to come by.

Put simply, you can attach real dollar amounts to every front page digg, if you want to calculate the cost it takes to generate each inbound link (in time, or whatever unit cost you’d like), or, if you want, calculate the cost it would take to generate that amount of traffic by PayPerClick engine (albeit really untargeted traffic).

When there’s this amount of gain, I think it stands to reason that people will do whatever it takes to exploit a system.  If that system is based on votes, then yes — that means people creating sock puppet accounts, joining groups or creating lists of folks for the express purpose of “social news promotion”, where people vote for each other.

It isn’t new, its been happening, I’m sure in some form or another, for at least a year, and I am also sure that its not so much a function of the “social networking” aspect of Digg so much as a maturation of what Digg “can do” for any given website — and that more and more marketing folks (and I use that broadly to encompass anyone who wants to get these benefits) are cottoning on to this fact since December of 2006.

In many respects, with these kind of out-of-Digg, or “extra-social-network” promotional activities that are carrying on, I’m not sure solutions like “anonymizing” votes will do any good at all.  Private lists of people will know who to vote for, and will go ahead and do it as folks on the list point to specific stories, even if the authors are all “blinded” on Digg.

I started this post by querying if these kinds of activities were really “gaming” Digg or not.  One hand it obviously is.  But on the other hand, the answer could just as easily be “probably not” — and this is because of its a natural consequence of what happened at Digg, and an inevitable consequence of Digg getting to be as large and as influential (from a exploitable SEO point of view) as its become.

If you doubt the latter (in a larger sense), I’d respectfully point you to the $300M evaluation Digg is looking to cash out for.