Although Annalee Newitz of Wired magazine spent a lot of time making a fake blog, it ended up making a pretty good story. Annalee tried gaming Digg by using the pay-per-digg service User/Submitter. In the whole scheme of things, I’m not quite sure what the benefit of doing this was except for the fact that she (he?) got a ton of temporary traffic. I’m sure if the traffic was targeted enough, it could have paid off in advertising click thrus. What I’ve heard though about the “Digg effect” is the temporary traffic onslaught rarely provides any ongoing benefits, and the users tend to click the link and leave immediately. When I saw Kevin Rose speak at The Future of Web Apps conference last week, he showed an interesting graph that shows Digg articles getting buried soon after they hit the front page. This was the same thing that Analee experienced. All in all I’m not quite sure what the benefit of using User/Submitter really is. Ideas?