Jokes about politics, sex, news, and rock and roll

 

• Top 10 sites that are growing faster than Digg ?

(Impact Lb )

 

When Kevin Rose pulled $1,000 out of his pocket and founded Digg.com on December 5, 2004, he didn't realize he was launching a revolution.  Now, a little over a year later several new community-driven, community-participation sites have emerged, all clones of Digg, and some are doing a pretty good job.  Here is our list of the top 10, but we would like to hear from you about others that we might have missed.

Doc Searls has famously said that “open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself.” Digg is “Disrupting the Fourth Estate” by doing the news cheaper, faster, and more narrowly tailored to the tastes of its individual readers.

But it will likely become more than that.  These sites will eventually work their way into the public relations field and begin to replace the traditional press release.  While the numbers may not be huge just yet, a few months of organic growth will dramatically change the equation.

After using quite a number of Digg clones extensively over the past couple weeks, these are the ones that I have found to be the easiest to use.  Perhaps this isn't the most scientific test, but I spent considerable time doing the research.  I’m not attempting to rate the traffic or the overall size of the community because that will change quickly.  My thinking is the best sites that are the easiest to use will rapidly suck in enormous amounts of traffic.  Usability is the key.

1. OpenTopix - A general news site that is very well designed and smooth operating.  Nice clean look.  The socialness is right there.
    
2. Oddnews.org – This site is for odd news, games, funny article links and other things that you think are cool.  Quite impressive.  Great site for the weirdest.  Nice user interface.
    
3. MySpy – General news and stories, created primarily for the South East Asia region.  My big complaint with SpyMy is that once you submit an article it creates a confusing screen and you don’t know if the article was posted or not.  You have to hit the back button to post another article. 
    
4. Kick.ie – Community driven Irish news. Clean look and feel.
    
5. Reddit- General news billed as an alternative to Digg and Slashdot.  Nice design and layout, easy to use.
    
6. Wobblog – Rescuing the very best news daily from the blogosphere.  This one hasn’t attracted a huge following but is a good functional site.
    
7. News Bump – General news from the UK, USA, and Australia
    
8. Staralicious – News about Hollywood and the Stars.  This site has attracted an active following and has some nice articles on it.  Good format and generally easy to use.
    
9. Scooop – General news site that also includes polls and surveys.
    
10. Blinklist – General news.  I’m not a big fan of pop-ups and this site uses various pop-up screens for submitting articles and other information notices.  Nice clean look
     

All together I looked at several dozen sites and tested them out.  Its very clear that many people have invested lots of hours creating their digg clone sites thinking that they would instantly take off and they haven’t.  Many sites I tested had broken links, features that weren’t working, and had the appearance of a crumbling, dying effort.  While there is an illusion that these sites run themselves, they simply don’t.  Much effort is required.

Two notable sites that are not on this list are reddit and del.icio.us.  Both are quite popular and have similar qualities to other digg-clone sites, but post only the title of the articles.  I had difficulties with both of these sites from a usability standpoint.

 

Click here for funny video clips