There are some who might say that John Chow is a Digg whore.
None can deny that his blog did not begin to skyrocket in popularity until he started getting on Digg.
I'm not talking about his other web properties, just his blog.
John has been writing some very good articles lately about the days of the last dot com boom and bust. I read them and I like them! I went to submit one to Digg when I found out his URL had been banned!
In the four pages of search results I found 10 buried stories from his blog out of 52 submissions!
He has had a lot of stories make the home page and he has generated tons of traffic to his blog. Traffic he has been able to monetize to a degree most bloggers can only dream of.
I'm very curious to see what the affect of no longer being on Digg will have on his revenue stream.
I know the occasional Digg helps me!
This, of course, brings up the usual questions of what criteria is used to get banned from Digg. I don't think anyone at Digg will answer that in any manner other than, "we have internal procedures for this sort of thing," and I don't expect them to give a real answer as deciding if a certain website should be banned from Digg is entirely up to Digg to decide.
The simple fact is that many people who monetize their blog want to be on Digg. Not all deserve to be on Digg though and it is up to Digg to police the URLs that it allows to be put on it's website.
I often bring up the subject of burying stories and dupe checking but in the end, it is up to Digg to police itself beyond even what the community does. I would like to know a little bit more about the process but again, I do not expect a public answer as those who try to game Digg will just use that public answer to alter their gaming methods.
One thing I would like though is that if I go to submit a banned URL to Digg for Digg to tell me why the URL was banned. It need only be a single line such as, "spam website" or "too many stories marked inaccurate" or what-ever, just something to let me know for my own personal peace of mind.
But, what do I know, I'm just a blogger!
Update: John has posted on his Blog about this and he has gotten a response from Digg:
When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise. Please review our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information.
-digg support
Looks like he's off of Digg for good...
I reviewed the Digg FAQ and I don't see anything about this in the FAQ.