Village Voice ‘gaming Digg’ and other social-media sites

When City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman told me recently that the paper’s Blotter blog saw traffic jump from 25,000 pageviews in October to 235,000 in December, he credited City Pages’ diverse content. But the spike struck technology blogger Ed Kohler as strange. In a new blog post today, he asks, “How does one manage to grow a blog’s traffic by 7X over two months?” The answer seems to be that City Pages and its fellow Village Voice Media papers seem to be gaming the popular social media site Digg. But it’s not just Digg: they’ve tried it with Stumbleupon, Reddit, Newsvine and others.