If you read Jack Humphrey's Friday Traffic Report blog, you may have seen his recent post Newsvine Sucks.

For those who haven't heard of it, Newsvine is yet another social news site where people can post links to articles of interest as well as post their articles directly on the site.

Apparently Jack feels Newsvine closed his account without just cause, while Newsvine claims he was spamming their site with press releases pointing to his own site.

Of course, it's all a matter of he said/he said now - the posts are all removed from the site so there's no way for anyone outside the several people involved to know for sure.

It brings up an interesting point however - one that I touched on in a previous post about web 2.0 sites hating marketers.

Is it reasonable for marketers to use these social news sites to generate traffic back to their own site?

Well, there are a couple of points to make.

1. It's their site, they can run it however they want and that includes booting people they don't like, agree with, or whatever other reason they come up with.

2. Are they really that different from those "self-promoting" marketers they hate so much? After all, they're piggybacking on stories from other websites, generating traffic by consolidating stories from other places on their site, for the most part. Essentially the reverse of what they accuse marketers of doing, but still using other people's resources to drive their own traffic.

How you see it is probably going to depend which side of the fence you're on.

Many of these communities of people have very strong anti-marketing attitudes. Another example can be found in this post on John Carlton's blog.

Those of us who are in the marketing business tend to get caught up in our own world and forget that not everybody sees things the way we do. If you really want proof of that, just have a read through some of the comments on Newsvine about Jack's post.

It's just something to keep in mind when you're using these sites. Don't put too much of your time and effort into building content for someone else (who makes money thanks to your content, by the way) when they can pull the rug out from underneath you any time they want.

You're much better off starting your own blog where you do most of your writing and content creation. Yes, it's going to take some work and some time to get traffic to it but once you do, nobody can shut you down and you can say anything you want to.

Even if you want to say Newsvine Sucks