A few days ago, I asked if you were a gamer, as in someone who "games the system."
Today, I ran across a detailed example of gaming a system, this time using social media. Niall Kennedy, a "syndication geek" from the Bay Area, wrote a great post entitled The Spam Farms of the Social Web.
In it, he examines how a certain website used digg, purchased links, del.icio.us, Newsvine, Reddit, and a Wordpress blog to drive lots of traffic towards its ads and affiliate links. It really is a brilliant piece of research and a blueprint for how to do it.
By the time you read the post, some of the services will probably have implemented changes to try and stop some of these abuses. But not all of them will because they can't. Eliminating everthing that this "gamer" did would cripple the services.
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