Lights That Blink

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch reviewed Spotplex a couple weeks back:

A new site called Spotplex launched today that arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does. I’ve been testing the service for the last couple of weeks and like what I’ve seen.

News stories are not submitted by users, as with Digg. Instead, sites that want to participate include some javascript code on their site, which monitors what stories/posts are read. The more times a story is read, the higher it appears in Spotplex. Very popular stories will make it to the Spotplex home page.

This digg comment captured it best:

this is not a digg clone. this is a way to help the big sites become bigger.

digg finds good content - this site finds big content.

I don’t think there’s anything sinister about Spotplex…but the whole concept of it got me thinking.

Assume that somebody out there (Om, Arrington, one of their competitors, etc…) wanted hard numbers, uniques and page views, for some of the big blogs. Since Spotplex’s algorithm rewards pageviews and/or uniques, then popular blogs have a greater incentive to play along. And with that widget sitting there on your blog, Spotplex gets to know EVERYTHING about your visitors.

Who wouldn’t pay good money for detailed stats from TechCrunch or other big tech/web2.0 blogs? Or, perhaps the question is, who wouldn’t be willing to fund a startup that could get all that information for relatively cheap?

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to Spotplex, but really any service out there that has you plop some javascript onto your blog (like mybloglog monitoring adsense clicks).

tags: digg, social news, spotplex

Posted by Doug | No Comments »

So I read most of the article by Annalee Newitz in Wired.

I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What’s more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a “popular” story that earned 124 diggs — more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.

Interesting stuff. Especially if you know, as Mike Arrington points out, Wired’s parent company owns reddit (one digg’s biggest competitors).

Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

I’m not as up-in-arms as Arrington is. But he has a point. Wired should have more prominently disclosed that their parent company owns a digg competitor. Or, better still, they should have tried gaming all the big social news sites (delicious, digg, netscape and reddit).

In the end I think that digg supporters are shooting the messenger though. She was able to game the system and in the process expose the herd mentality of digg.

tags: digg, social news

Posted by Doug | No Comments »