Hi Doyon,

is Spotplex meant only for blogs or it can be well used for/from other type of news/article based sites?
thanks
web2innovations

For now, we only support blogs, but we are going to expand our coverage to anything with RSS feed shortly.

I like the concept anyway. I’ve signed up and will try it out.

We experimented with this exact same technique over at Skwit.com for awhile. We played with both a javascript method and an image beacon. From our experience, the image route greatly increased the ease of “joining” for our sites. Then again, that’s not necessarily a good thing

It’s an interesting method and I hope that they can pull it off.

To me, this is kind of similar to youtube. They really have 2 ways to order videos, rating and views. By far, views is a better indication of popularity. The little rating stars (ie votes) are pathetic.

As far as the inserting a block of code to your site, like all this stuff, it could be a non starter, or just take off any time. Only time will tell.

Another comment.

They sure did go ajax happy on this site. One time I had 4 little annoying spinning things whirling away. Better than one of those darned page reloads I guess.

Doyon - coming out of the box with a “popularity” based system without a way to level out sites is a mistake in my mind. You are setting yourself up for failure because at least for the first months?? you will be showing only the top blogs. A small great content blog will never hit your home page.

I would have figured that out before going live because many sites are already complaining about this it seems.

For example, It’s very different than going live knowing your page layout might change.

This looks good. In the total ‘BlogStanding’ I am standing 3rd. Quite proud..;) though my hosting provider has reduced the bandwidth because of the traffic.

Oh - and I tried to register using the code sent to me, and it says after sitting for 5 minutes “unfortunately we cannot accept custom blog at this time”

What the heck does that mean Doyon? It’s just a line of JS code right?

Nice, I got an invite
They do need some more servers though… site is a bit slow.

DK,
We actually have the hood up on our RSS engine right now doing some enhancements so if there is anything we can do on our end to make our feeds better let me know. Something that may be throwing you guys off is our permalinks are SEO so you can reach the same article a dozen or more different ways like.

video/ArticleGUID.htm
TagName/PageNumber/ArticleGUID.htm
HotestVideo/PageNumber/ArticleGUID.htm
RecentVideo/PageNumber/ArticleGUID.htm

Anyhow, I knew this might be problematic so it’s entirely understandable that you guys had a hard time digesting our custom feed.

I tested this out yesterday and had it running til today but I don’t like inserting images (even choosing no image gives you a transparent image, which with my CSS causes a border to be wrapped around it) and it locked up my page loading today, causing our archives to not load while Spotplex kept trying to connect. They need to find a better way of delivering pageviews via scripting that doesn’t interfere with the websites themselves.

Great idea — I could see MyBlogLog possibly launching something like this; they already have javascript on plenty of blogs. They could also highlight specific posts/articles that friends in my network have read.

A lot of links submitted to Digg are random pages with interesting content that someone has found. These are typically not submitted to Digg by the page authors themselves.

It seems like Spotplex is going to strongly favour attention-seeking blogs that want to be found over interesting “found” pages…

Another reason why this is a dumb idea - the fact that people visit an article does not mean it’s useful. In a Digg-like environment, people first read it, and THEN consider whether or not to vote for it or post it as new.

So basically, say TechCrunch links to some post. People will click it just to see Mike is talking about, and then it will climb as a top SpotPlex article. Horrible concept.

DK - what are you talking about?

Of course the number of impressions IS a biased measure. All it reflects is that some celebrity blogger decided that HE likes a certain article and since his blog is so popular, many will follow the link just because HE liked it. So in essence, ONE TOP BLOGGER will be able to manipulate the top results.

No wonder Mike here loves it

It’s like DIGG, without the redundant “DIGGING” rigamarole that is all really just a silly proxy for popularity, which is already measured by clickthroughs. People push the button on DIGG because they think it matters, and they think it counts for something. Like the fools on LOST. But popularity is intrinsic. DIGGING is unnecessary.

Doyon, you really need to cache your home page.

perm hater,
I see your point, however I disagree wit you. It’s socially unacceptable on Digg to make a blog post and then dig your own blog post. Instead you have to get someone to submit it for you which reading through the posts are typically the same author with a masked identity.

The reality is that these news aggregation services drive traffic to sites just as Google and company, so it’s business critical to bloggers to have all of their content available and indexed on these aggregation sites. perhaps this is where Digg fails?

Now on ranking popularity by page views vs votes. In a techie world I agree with you that voting is a better metric, but the growing majority of sites out there are not techie sites and my experience has been the less techie the audience, the likelihood that a user will do something techie with the info like vote, comment or submit to a news aggregation site is far lower.

To prove my point look at the Top Podcasts on Digg vs Apple iTunes. I think iTunes is a much better yardstick for popular podcasts as Digg biases to techie interest.

Anyhow, just my experience YMMV

It does seem like a nice change from Digg, but as Allen mentioned, the ‘little guy’ is never going to make it to the front page, even if he/she has the scoop on a bigger blog.

I want to try it out for awhile and see how it goes anyway, just to give a new company a chance.

It would be great to get a reply to my questions.

Knowing that Mike was in an exclusive on the testing, Doyon should have been ready for this article and be ready to answer questions as they come in.

What I mean is that Spotplex knew an article was coming - unlike most startup posts here.

the site looks awesome but it’s taking a long time to load!!

Whether this is effective is all based on how you determine if I’ve read a story or not. I could simply employ the same tactics spammers and click fraudsters employ to boost my rating. (that said you can do the same thing on digg if you wanted to).

That being said at least “human” voters on digg have to actively lend their support. Where as on this site if I was duped into reading a crappy article by a catchy headline, it would count as a vote where I really wanted to bury. YouTube and others have this problem, where as Digg, which is far from perfect does not.

The only system that would work is something akin to google’s link based ranking. The more people linking to a story, likely the better it is.

As many of you pointed out, balancing among articles from small blogs and big blogs, is one of the first things we will need to work on once we stabilize our service environment. As Mike suggested, we are planning to implement a sort of relative popularity measure, so that articles from smaller blogs can have equal opportunity to shine.

By the way, we are not necessarily aiming to replace Digg. I have been a Digg user and enjoyed using it. In certain areas (especially areas which require expert knowledge), Digg like services might produce better results than Spotplex can. However, relying solely on voting system has its own drawbacks as I mentioned earlier. Though I have to admit the impression count may not be a single perfect measure, I believe it would be better to catch general publics’ opinions and preferences in broad subjects.

I forgot to put my email address in my previous post. Please feel free to contact me at dkim@spotplex.com if you have any question or suggestion.

Thanks,

Doyon Kim
Spotplex, Inc.

Allen, can you send me your blog URL and blog software you use? As you can tell, we count impression of articles. For that we need to analyze the site/URL structure and distinguish actual article page from the other pages such as index or menu pages. If a blogger uses a custom format, we sometimes have hard time to analyze it.

Not sure if everyone ever thought of that, but you should know that I for example can buy traffic for a specific article on my site using Paid-to-Read incentive visitors. So why would that be different than paying diggers ?

I could get at least 50 000 visitors / day with less than $100 maybe.

It’s not fraud-proof yet !

Forgot to say, that from my point of view it IS a better idea than Digg.

It just need tweaks to prevent those that I’ve said before

Hmm…

Spotplex doesn’t show too many hits for TechCrunch articles.. Only 12K for the top one? Aren’t there supposed to be thousands and thousands of TC readers out there? I think TC has been losing readers lately… but that’s just me.

Actually I just realized another flaw in the design of Spotplex:

Many bloggers publish full RSS, so the reader never visits the permalink. Same goes for those who visit the blog main page and read an article that is either short enough or where the publisher doesn’t ask to click on the permalink to read the rest.

Hmm…

I wanted to check this out but it was taking for ever to come up, so I left it loading and forgot about it. Came back the next morning and it was still loading. I’ll check it out when those servers cool down. It does sound interesting though.

I am giving this a try. i assume it counts RSS feeds as well as page views?

That didn’t take long. Real time = heavy load.

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘SQLException’ with message ‘Table ‘./Spotplex/urlpool’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired’ in /opt/lampp/htdocs/inc/inc.safe_mysqli.php:92 Stack trace: #0 /opt/lampp/htdocs/inc/inc.dbstub.php(242): safe_mysqli->call(’call sp_blog_ge…’) #1 /opt/lampp/htdocs/all/index/findcode_infor.php(6): SpotplexDb->sp_blog_get_info(’901747′) #2 /opt/lampp/htdocs/all/index/index_config.php(47): include_once(’/opt/lampp/htdo…’) #3 /opt/lampp/htdocs/web_allsystem_load.php(49): include_once(’/opt/lampp/htdo…’) #4 /opt/lampp/htdocs/code.php(4): include_once(’/opt/lampp/htdo…’) #5 {main} thrown in /opt/lampp/htdocs/inc/inc.safe_mysqli.php on line 92

We had some database related problem this morning. The problem itself was caused by a minor error in our code, but we left it unattended too long since it happened early in the morning for us. I sincerely apologize to the people who have visited our web site for the inconvenience we have caused. Our site is performing well now.

Doyon Kim
Spotplex

If you splice the genetics of Digg (votes) copulated with Spotplex(impressions) and toss in some Google News (clustering and link weight) you would end up with the ultimate news/blog site. I would call it DooglePlex.

DK - I’ve been running the Spotplex img code for 24hrs on my blog now, and not a single article is showing up on Spotplex. Can you please take a look?

Check out the politics section. Every article is from “Gay News Daily”.

I have an interesting analogy. Spotplex is to Nielsen Ratings as Digg is to the Emmy Awards. For the first, we watch TV everyday, while, for the latter, a pool of voters cast their votes once a year.

Which one is better? Well. Let’s just say we don’t compare Nielsen and the Emmy.

the site does not work, everthing is loading and loading… for example I can not see the “Spot Tags of the Day”

DK - Thanks for fixing the code.

I’m curious as to the type of traffic everyone is getting from Spotplex? I’ve made it to the front page a few times, but barely any traffic has come from Spotplex.

I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.http://www.vdownload.org

Had it installed for about 3 weeks. Took it off today. Completely useless imho.
0 visitors from Spotplex in that entire time. Looked at the Alexa stats for Spotplex today - this article is the only thing they had going for them. I don’t see this service going anywhere.

Spotlex is no more.