The secret of being Dugg, exposed

I wrote an article about Smashing Magazine and was going to post it next week. Not sure if I’m still going to.

You’ve probably seen Smashing Magazine at least once; almost every entry they “write” has made it to the front page of Digg because of their abuse use of Top X Lists.

The reason I’m considering not posting my original article and giving them any more praise for mastering the art of being Dugg, is because it seems that they like to borrow their lists from others.

Today’s post which has almost 1400 Diggs at the moment, is called “83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen“. A couple people have commented on Digg saying it looks a little familiar to another post on another blog, “80 Wordpress Themes“. In fact, it looks exactly the same other than them adding 3 additional blogs to the list.

I could be mistaken and both sites might be owned and written by the same individual, albeit highly unlikely.

So, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll ever post anything else about Smashing Magazine. I’d like to hear what they have to say about this “borrowed interest” first. Anybody want to step up to the mic?

UPDATE: Read Vitaly Friedman’s comment below. Amazing how quickly he got back to us. I’m still not a fan of republishing content from one blog to another. But thanks for clearning up the issue Vitaly nonetheless.