Most Digg features are helpful and have seen great improvements over the years, however, there is one feature that is just about as useless and as horrible as a feature can get: blog this. In its current state “blog this” has very little practical use - and based on what I see it causes more harm than good.
The main problem is many of the blogs in the blog this section are basically splogs. They are usually loaded with ads, and they use this semi-auto-blogging feature to automatically post to their blog. It isn’t uncommon to see them do 30-100 posts per day - and I’d imagine they get quite a bit of traffic from Digg. Depending on how popular a post is - using “blog this” can get you anywhere from one to a couple dozen visitors - at least in my experience. Your results may vary.
This little problem can be solved very easily - allow trackbacks or remove the feature all together. By allowing trackbacks Digg would be letting more legit blogs, who do not use their lame “blog this” feature, get something in return for linking to and mentioning a Digg story. A good alternative to trackbacks would be to display Technorati or Google Blog Search links. The only other good alternative would be to completely remove the “blog this” section.
What do you think - should they try to fix it or remove it?
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