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Is their a market for niche-vertical Digg Clones?

Dave Winer is talking elitism again, suggesting that he’d like a digg-clone with 25, 100, or 1000 members comprised of those who he considers worthy.

First observation: FARK is essentially a hybrid between Winer’s vision and Digg. The FARK elite are the mods who have the power to “greenlight” a submission from TotalFark and push it up onto the frontpage of fark.com. FARK imposes a Winer-style “elite filter” on top of a Digg-style submitter-pool. ParisLemon points out that Calacanis’ Netscape tried for a similar model, with more public moderation and moderated and user-voted content in parallel.

Second Observation: The Blogosphere already does this, to a degree. This is the concept that TechMeme figured out first: each link in a blog post is essentially a “submission” to the blogosphere, if the blogosphere were itself a digg-style aggregator. That is to say, bloggers are the curators: Each blog post that links to the same story/webpage/etc. counts as another vote in its favour. To carry over Winer’s idea, he’d like a customizable pool of blogs to draw on to populate his aggregator.

IMHO, TechMeme lost its way a bit over time, by including things like MSM coverage, dugg stories, and press releases - opening the curation too wide (hence my response at TechWatching).

Bring it all together…

And were talking about a spectrum of curation with two axes:

Dave Winer’s staked out that corner that says “community moderation of small pool of submitters,” compare to, for example, FARK’s position at “direct moderation of a large pool,” or Digg’s “indirect (community) moderation of a large pool.” Netscape sits awkwardly in the middle, hoping to hold the middle ground.

So: is there a market in Dave’s corner of aggregation-space? What do you think? The chart above does nothing to relate position to “quality” - so I suppose ultimately it depends on the quality of the Elite that Winer deigns to include. Perhaps there’s a different middle ground to be found by voting on who’s considered “elite” enough to be one of the curators…

aggregators, dave winer, digg, fark, scripting news, techmeme techwatching

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