Webupon

Digg is a news aggregation/social bookmarking type site.  Interesting news and stuff from around the world that people want to know.

If you’ll remember back to earlier this year Digg changed the way it’s URL’s worked when it came to framing pages that were Digg-ed.  Instead of taking you to the publisher’s site it would open a frame on Digg and show you the item.  But there was hell to pay over that move and Digg changed it back so you would only get the frame if you were logged in to your Digg account.  If you weren’t, you were sent to the site.

Now Digg is doing it again. 

Digg links became the standard, rising above such sites as “tinyurl” and others to become the links of choice for people using Twitter, a service to tweet out short messages, including links, to friends, family, and followers.

Now Digg has changed the way their URL’s work again so that if you are not logged in to your Digg account, any Digg link will take you to the Digg splash page, rather than taking you to the article itself.’

Include the thousands upon thousand of people who have installed the Diggbar, the Digg toolbar, and you have a serious amount of traffic being hijacked from their rightful addresses and instead going to Digg. 

It’s like following a signpost that says Los Angeles 300 miles, and instead of the highway going to LA it takes you to Las Vegas.

It’s hijacking traffic, and it’s hijacking trends too, since Twitter users use Digg URL’s to tweet info because of their size.  Now, trend following will point to Digg instead of the actual news.

It’s sneaky and underhanded.  The least they could do is tell people they made the change.