C.K. Sample

Just as I told Jet Numbers a while back, you are engaging in unethical practices when you ask to pay top Diggers or any top social bookmarkers to falsely promote your content. You do just that in this email, which you sent to one of Netscape’s Navigators and which was forwarded to me and posted with this particular Netscape Navigator’s permission:

From: Joe
Date: Jan 9, 2007 7:19 PM
Subject: Interested in paying you to submit a post to digg

My name is joe whyte and I am looking for a top digger to submit a new post to digg in order to make our post more popular in the digg community. I am not sure how much you would want for this but we are willing to pay you and can pay pal right away.

We are starting a web hosting war basically and we are attempting to offer the best deals on the web and if another company can beat us then we will beat that offer.

We are just releasing a new hosting plan for $6.95 a month we are giving away a free domain name for life, 250GB of storage, 2500GB of data transfer, 11 sites can be hosted on this account, $700 worth of coffeecup web design software, fantastico scripts, cms and blogging scripts and 24/7 award winning customer support!

If you are interested please let me know.

Thanks,

-Joe Whyte

Lunarpages.com

Blog.lunarpages.com

I’m not sure if you are aware of the implications of this, but as both Digg and Netscape—and for that matter, most social news sites—are framed on the idea of Democracy, your attempt to buy off the votes and influence of some of the top members of these sites is somewhat analogous to someone trying to buy off a Senator or House Member’s votes or perhaps electoral college votes.

I advise that you retract this approach and seriously rethink your strategy, before it destroys your reputation beyond repair.

Please know that we will be banning your site and any other sites known to work with you from ever being able to submit stories to Netscape. I hope that the Internet community as a whole joins us in this endeavor. You may need us and our clicks, but we do not need you and your dishonest practices.

Sincerely,

C.K. Sample III