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The News Corp.-owned Times of London has been paying a search-engine optimizer to do the dirty work of shilling Times Online stories to social media sites like Mahalo, StumbleUpon, and MetaFilter. We can't believe it either — that The Times is actually paying an outside firm to submit stories. My boss makes me do it the hard way.

Readers would have to be naive to believe that everyone from Gawker Media, (the publisher of Valleywag) and Weblogs Inc. to Wired and BusinessWeek aren't madly submitting every story to the likes of Digg and relying on the entire employee pool to solicit coverage at blogs and other news outlets. There's no shame in relying on the Web's tools to gain a competitive edge. It's just pathetic that the Times isn't confident enough to do its own Digging.