TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

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

TechWatching.com v1.5 is Live

I mentioned earlier that I might spin off my relevance algorithm as a standalone site - which I’ve now gone ahead and done at TechWatching.com. TechWatching is a blog/news aggregator that competes squarely with TechMeme.

TW is divided into 4 sections:

Hot Topics: TW maintains a keyword index of the blogs it follows. When a keyword shows up more frequently than average, it can be promoted to a Hot Topic - in which case it will show up at the top of the page with closely related keywords and relevant stories.
New Stories: Immediately under the Hot Topics resides “new stories” - stories that are getting attention in the tech blogosphere, but that don’t fit into a specific Hot Topic. This area is analogous to the TechMeme presentation.
Below the Fold: Under New Stories resides BTF: Stories that have fallen out of the New Stories area because they are aging and haven’t gotten enough momentum behind them to stay “new” or to be promoted to a Hot Topic.
Must Read: The right-hand column contains a list of the most-clicked on stories of the last 24 hours, collected from the site and RSS readers. Presumably lots of people are reading these - and thus, so should you.

That’s it in a nutshell. Its only refreshing hourly right now, but I’ll be ramping up the rate tonite.

Below is a screenshot, or click over to http://techwatching.com to see the real thing. Feedback is welcome and appreciated!