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In the war of the social bookmark sites, Digg is the good guy and Netscape is the bad guy, right? According to this reader, Digg is a hive of scum and villainy, and if Netscape becomes one too, it's all the fault of outside marketers. Shane Coffey reports on the covert scam scheme threatening to ruin social bookmarking.

Ok, I left a comment on [Netscape head] Jason Calacanis blog a while back that I had an idea to get people to pay me to post their links to Netscape for a fee. On his blog I stated that I felt that it is was unethical to get to do this. I also sent [blogger-about-blogs] Duncan Riley and e-mail telling him about this business venture. He never responded about it, and thats good, Duncan is a good guy, and I really could not bring myself to actually start this little venture. Here is the reason I felt that it was unethical to do a business like that. Digg is corrupt and everyone knows it, now if I were to start charging people to put links on Netscape, I would be corrupting the system in much the same way. these social bookmarking sites are supposed to be a democracy, and digg just does not get that. My handle on Netscape is shane_coffey2, and I am one of the top contributors right now as we speak.

Having said that I don't believe getting a thousand dollars from Netscape themselves is unethical, because it is still me finding the links to stories placed on Netscape. To me it is not getting paid to put links on Netscape that they want to see, it is more about paying me for the time that I put into making a site good. To make it clear Netscape has not offered me any money at all and its not likely they will.

Which brings me to why I e-mailed you guys. I received a letter from dingo media, which is at the bottom of this e-mail. The more I read their offer the more it seemed fishy to me. It sounded like a pitch for viagra, or some fantasy trip that no one wants. So I did e-mail them back to get more info, like what website they are from. This what their reply to me was:

Good question—re-reading my original message, it sounds like I'm pushing porn or viagra websites.

It's the website for a major news-weekly; all of their print stories, plus some web-only articles get published there over the course of the week. All stuff that you'd be ok with your kids reading, if that helps.

In order to give you more details, I'd need you to sign an NDA.
So I then replied back to them there is no way for me to do this, it just does not smell right to me.

Shane Coffey

————— Forwarded message —————
From: dingomed


Date: Jul 25, 2006 3:18 PM
Subject: Contact Form Results
To: [address redacted]


dingomed wrote:
Shane,

I recently read one of your comments in a comment thread on calacanis.com. In
that comment you indicated that you would be interested in getting paid to
contribute to the new Netscape portal.

I'm not associated with Netscape, and I can't offer to pay you a flat fee for
posting there. However, my company works with certain media companies that are
interested in increasing traffic to their websites. We are currently testing a
new method of traffic promotion; essentially we are paying individuals to post
stories from these clients to various social networking sites.

For example, if you found a story on a client site that you think would be of
interest to the netscape community, you would post it to netscape (just like
you do already). You would then be paid based on the traffic that the post
generated.

To be clear, we're only interested in legit posts, legit votes and legit
traffic—if our posters game the system, then we run the risk of both breaking
the social networking model, and damaging our clients' reputations (which would
lose them the traffic that they already get from the social networking sites).

Is this something that you might be interested in? Probably obvious, but I hope
that you will keep this confidential.

Website:
IP: 204.194.30.31

Story by Shane Coffey. This week, Coffey says, he'll write a response to another hot-button issue: Netscape's decision to snub its top users as it hires outsiders to take their place.