Digg is a community-participation site where you can dig for stories. A community-participation revolution was going on while it was being launched a shade over 4 years ago. Social networking sites were breathing a lot of pleasant fire and blogging sites working towards community blogs had become the order of the day. These made certain Mr. Kevin Rose decide on creating a community platform where you could submit a story, link it to the database, comment on a given story and also vote for or against it. Digging and burying are the terms used for voting for or against a story.
Though Digg has cornered some criticism for the fact that it can be manipulated by users for the purpose of adding sensationalism, Digg has well and truly stood guard as a quality pioneer. Since its success, many Digg clones have entered the world of Digg-like applications. These again are sites that use stories and link them to the database for the purpose of voting for or against it.
Most of such sites have two sections; new stories and popular stories. Registered users submit links, titles, description and a story. These then become a part of the database. Just as it gets its mass readership (in form of positive voting), it gets appreciated to ‘popular stories”. For this to happen, a story shall get half of the votes that popular stories get. Stories receiving over a 100 negative votes are automatically deleted from the database. Looking at the success of Digg and finding it to be a great monetizing and recreational web activities, the Digg clones have come up with similar ideas. Let’s take a look into top 10 Digg clones in operations. Their weight and rankings differ owing to different norms of evaluation.
MySpy- Meant to cater chiefly to the south Asian region, it is a big house for stories, news and articles, though there have been complaints about its screen that perhaps confuses about the story posts, everything else seems to be without glitch. Each time, while posting an article, you need to press the back button with this one. Overall, MySpy gets a positive vote
Citizen bay- This one is linked with indigenous news of America. While it has the plus points of featuring events, classifieds and opinion, it’s minus is the fact that only opinions are open to being voted. The interface is not all that great.
Del.icio.us- It is a social bookmaking site that only allows for title. Having said this, it has amassed a fair subscriber base. It has friendly uniform resource locators and case sensitive tags. The front page has been recently renovated. It further has tag bundles for fast access and various color formats for bookmarks.
Shout wire- Another well-formatted site that is also a very effective operator. The voting structure is well defined and the overall framework of the site is improvising and intuitive. Critics suggest that the vote tallying system in the event of submitting an article needs to be worked on. Overall, even this one gets a positive vote.
Furl- it is another social bookmaking site using categories, comments and voting patterns. While adding a bookmark, it automatically alerts for duplicates.
Staralicious- As the name suggests, this one talks about the stars of Hollywood. With such a reader-loved topic, you can simply behave like a celebrity bog and amass high readership. The site does it the hard way. It uses all the nice articles written on Hollywood to increase its subscriber base. The format of the site is reader friendly and the interface is not daunting or confusing at all. This makes it easily navigable.
Reddit- Reddit is a very smart one. It has a huge subscriber base and the articles are of top quality. Its bottleneck is the fact that it only allows for titles.
Jump it- this one is a niche site yet it has some following. It’s related to the PSP hacks. There is homebrew revolution on air with each hacker claiming he has outsmarted the latest firmware upgrade from Sony. The site helps in voting for or against such claims.
Bibilog- Working with an intuitive interface, the site talks about all that is nice and fine with videos, games and tempting links. This way, it can magnetically attract readership. Link submission at a very fast pace marks the site.
Blinklist-Though it is flushed with excellent articles and stories, it still irritates users at times due to a large quantity of unwanted pop-ups. Needless to say that such pop-ups take away from the quality of readership. Overall, the voting structure and the digging and burying features are quite likeable.
These are few of the Digg-like applications that are doing well. These might not be the best in terms of subscriber base but are certainly doing well in terms of quality.
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