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Filed under: Blogging, Technology | Tags: Blogging, digg, Innit, Nuffnang, Ping, Ping.sg
It has been a little more than a month now since Innit, a Digg clone for blogs, was launched by Nuffnang, a blog advertising network based in Singapore and Malaysia. There were some talk going on about how Innit is a direct competitor with Ping.sg, Singapore’s blog aggregator, even though there are some major differences between the two.
Innit
Innit’s concept is a exact replica of Digg’s , which is that the top hits are supposed to represent good content that many people liked and voted for and hence the average reader may find interesting as well. However, as the team at Digg points out, such a system will succeed only under large scale participation. This problem is evident in Innit’s case. If you go to Innit now, you can see that 3 votes may very well send the article to the top 10 list which is definitely not a good representation of the publics’ opinion.
Another observation I have from the site after 1 month of operation, is that a lot of the posts that hit the top charts are Nuffnang related. This is probably because Innit is still largely used by Nuffnang supporters, i.e. I just did a run through of the top 10 posts and all of them serve Nuffnang Ads. It may be more appropriate for a third party to launch such a service as the credibility of the votes in the system is largely undermined due to the vested interest Nuffnang has in these bloggers.
Ping
Ping’s system, on the other hand, is also by no means perfect. Unlike Innit’s recommendation system, an entry in Ping is scored based on the number of click-throughs. This makes the system extremely easy to game as a provocative title is enough to get itself a high score regardless of the content. That is probably why titles with the words ’sex’ or ‘naked’ will definitely get an entry to the very top of the charts. Look at the top ten posts for the 1-year range and half those posts have sexual implications.
Hence, due to the nature of their scoring system, the content in the top 10 list may not represent the very best. The question is then whether implementing the digg voting system to Ping, which has a much larger readership, would work. This would definitely remove all the spam as votes are displayed to the public and I’m sure not many users would want to be associated with a porn-related post. However, I highly doubt it would work even with the high readership as Singaporeans tend to be less participatory in technology that serves frivolous purposes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, even though I’m more for the concept of actually voting, digg-style, I highly doubt Innit will be able to chalk up enough neutral and active users to give a representative top 10 list and Ping will still give a better list of interesting reads.
