At the end of a particularly insightful post on ClappingTrees, J.K. asks why the huge backlog of submitted sites can’t be opened up to everyone, Digg-style, in order to get sites approved (she’s referring to the DMOZ and Technorati backlogs here). She also points out some flaws with the Alexa ranking system (as I pointed out in my comment on that post, the reality is that Alexa’s ranking system, which they say consists of millions of users with Alexa toolbars installed, is less than perfect, and actually consists of probably around 180 000 users).
Tecnorati, in a sense, does act like a collaborative ranking system. The only problem with that collaborative ranking system is that only site owners who create a link to other sites get a say as to what blogs are popular — site readers (who don’t own a blog) don’t have any way to have their voice heard on Technorati.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many people that Digg users pretty much hate blogs (unless you’re Smashing Magazine apparently). So on the one hand, we have Digg users who are collaboratively rating content (but largely don’t want to see blog content — and for the record, I’m not knocking Digg for that, the Digg community can decide to see or not see whatever they want), and on the other hand, we have Technorati that only ranks blog content through links (which are created by blog owners, not readers).
So what about sites like Blogtoplist.com? Blogtoplist allows blog owners to submit their blogs, where they can be voted on (by providing a button, like the one you see in my sidebar). The problem with this? The user is still voting on a site, instead of voting on the content that appears on that site.
It would seem, from this analysis, that there is a gap to be filled for a site that:
1. Allows users to vote on blog content.
2. Doesn’t just give votes to blog owners.
3. Is designed specifically for blogs (and the users go there for blog content, unlike Digg).
4. Doesn’t rely on a toolbar or some other archaic method for determining popularity.
Perhaps someone has already identified this need and is working on a site to make up for this gap? Or perhaps there is a current site that exists that I’ve overlooked. Either way, I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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March 15th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
actually, there’s already such site – Blogg-Buzz – it’s like Digg for blogs, and users rate the blog posts. It’s just picking up, so only time will tell how popular it becomes. I wrote about blogg-biuzz a couple of months ago, it doesn’t bring as much traffic as digg or reddit, but it’s out there.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I knew someone had to have thought of this already!
That’s really interesting — I hadn’t come across Blogg-Buzz before. It’s certainly very much a clone of Digg. I guess it’s still growing, since I notice that the ‘Recently Popular’ tab includes items which only have 5-15 buzzes and are almost 3 weeks old. But it’s a great idea and a great start. Thanks for stopping by to point this out.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
oh, you’re welcome. How long did it take Digg to become so popular? How did they achieve this popularity? I guess guys from Blogg-buzz should ask questions like those and promote their site. Of course, all bloggers should promote it too. But yes, the idea is great.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
actually, I just realized that my personal tip for 29 Traffic generation tips project was about submitting your blog posts to Blogg-buzz
March 15th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I’d have to agree. If you’re looking to create a popular site that is based on another site’s successful model — try to emulate that success in whatever way you can. Blogg-Buzz would be smart to follow Digg’s lead as to achieving that popularity.
And you’re right about submitting blog posts to sites like Blogg-Buzz — it certainly helps to increase your traffic. I think I’ll go create a Blogg-Buzz account to check it out.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I guess it is indeed tough to collabrate all the blogs on a single judging platform. First of all there’s too many of them. It would be too hectic to include and locate all the blogs in one place. Secondly, it would take more than just a profit-motivated company to initiate this move.
March 17th, 2007 at 5:27 am
Thanks, Lucas. Your observations and suggestions are quite thought-provoking.
Thanks, InspirationBit, for the info on Blogg-Buzz. Do bloggers need to submit post by post? Or can we just ping?
In Singapore, there’s a relatively new metablog called Ping.sg. We bloggers simply ping it and when readers read a post, they are considered to have Pong’ed it. There’s no voting system though.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Yes, bloggers do need to submit post by post – it’s just like Digg.
March 17th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Lyndon — I think Technorati (or someone using info from Technorati) could do this. They already track blogs and blog posts, so I think someone could figure out a way to then rank the blogs based on this (or possibly come up with a similar system to rank blogs — and to combat the quick-death effect of many blogs, possibly have a minimum number of posts or something like that before a blog could be considered).
Ping.sg — very interesting. This is very interesting push-pull kind of model for having information delivered to readers. Thanks for mentioning this!
March 18th, 2007 at 1:19 am
Theres also something called CrispyBlogPosts or something like that which is a bit like Digg but for blogs, but of course its not a proper ranking system for blogs.
Perhaps Feedburner is in the best position to really rank blogs since it has access to reader statistics, I dont know. Of course I suspect lots of people wouldnt want their subscriber numbers public…
March 19th, 2007 at 8:55 am
The biggest problem I see with all survey data is the reliability of the ‘random’ sample. Alexa users are a pretty small percentage of web users, and certainly aren’t representative of the readers of most of the sites and blogs that I read (being IE users happy to have their every move tracked).
I suspect the killer tracker will appear from one of the many stats plugins or meta social networks (like mybloglog) or playthings (like stumbleupon) which manage to achieve a wide enough userbase across various demographics.
If they use this network well they will have interesting numbers to publish on actual usage. They then pop up a simple digg-a-like which floats opinion data on top of this ‘actual usage’ data.
I think if feedburner, technorati or sphere were going to do this well they’d have done it by now.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:31 am
CrispyBlogPosts is certainly a Digg-a-like (to use Steve’s turn of phrase), but doesn’t seem to have much traction so far. I’m sure there many more Digg imitators out there who have decided to be ‘Digg for blogs’. I guess it will remain to be seen if one of these manages to gather more steam than it currently has.
Steve — the ‘random sample’ issue is a huge problem for Alexa. I think it would be interesting for someone to poll IE users with Alexa toolbars installed, and ask them if they know all the sites they visit are being sent to Alexa. I would be interested to know what percentage didn’t really understand what the toolbar even did.
Technorati did seem to be trying to do a bit of Digg thing with Technorati WTF, where users could vote for posts. I think the real secret to Digg’s success however, lies in Digg’s user community — and developing a community that has a hardcore affinity to your site is not easy to do.
April 4th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I haven’t heard of Blog-Buzz yet but I’ll check it out. I’ve been looking for a good digg alternative that’s not only tech related. Hopefully Blog-Buzz won’t disappoint.
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:37 am
Lucas,
what i heard about alexa is that it’s planted into all microsoft internet explorer related links.
so, it’s not just people who use alexa toolbar. but almost everyone using msie is counted into that ranks.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:38 am
Rankingfever (“Rank whatever exists”) is probably your solution. But only in french yet. Ask them if you want to be the First US Ranker to start the US section….
September 21st, 2007 at 8:39 am
oooops I didn’t give u the url: http://www.rankingfever.net