Spotplex is making me think…
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 »