Exclusive: Is Spotplex a Better Digg?

Looks awesome!

It will be tough to find great content from less popular services.

Also, they are depending quite a bit on the user actually putting their code onto their website. A bit too risky for me, but there could be a great reward if it is adopted.

But now, in order to game the system, people running a site that want a high SpotPlex rating will just generate a tone of page views from the few workstations they have available to them.

SpotPlex better put click-fraud detection in, just like Google in order to prevent this.

I had sign-up issues; the email didn’t actually have my code in it, I couldn’t retrieve it, etc. while trying to work -so I gave up.

I have a hard time imagining how it could be worse than Digg, so I’d say yes. Scratch that, it could be worse. If it were Reddit.

The mechanism sounds decent actually, at least something sort of new.

With the anonymous negative voting of Digg I just don’t see it improving, just getting more and more like it is already. Apple++ MS– wow interesting.

I’m impressed with the new idea. I bet there can be a bunch of spin-off ideas off of this.

The one fraud that I would be worried about could be near DOS attacks on sites that provide content in order for someone’s article to make it to the top.

But this is still a great way to discover new blogs and news sites.

Wasted vc-dollars. Isn’t Opinity in deadpool yet?

“…Insert your Spotplex code in your blog….you can also find how many people read your articles.”

funny, as if there is no way to find how many people read the article.

How is this different than techmeme.com?

interesting concept…

but what i’m really looking for, is a cross between this, and a digg like site, that also allows me to combine information based on the ‘users’ who are doing the voting.

in all honesty, i don’t really care what 12 year olds like, and i don’t have a way to know anything about the people who are doing the voting in a digg type of application.

now, if you allow me to be able to run filters on the articles based on different attributes for the people who’ve selected/voted on an article, now we have something…

thoughts/comments….

peace

I tried the signup, but their tracking javascript inserts a spotplex logo into my blog…as a publisher I want this to work in the background without their logo branded on my page…

nice idea if they tweak the view algorithms to weed out the home page views versus actual article views

I am sold. I’m not a huge digg fan.

http://www.paybackisapicture.com

Definitely one of the better ideas featured here lately.

Problem solved via email from the company. Their logo on my page is a little disconcerting but what are you going to do? No big deal.

Anyone got an invite code?

J | http://www.sumolabs.com

Neet concept, simple too. Shame about the name though…. lacks the pop of “digg”.

I’m signing up our site right now to see if they can accomodate a custom video blog like us. Digg has a great video listing service it will be interesting to see if they munge blogs together or what…

The vast majority of these startup logos and brandings seem so indistinguishable…

I am confused. On Digg, the supposed best content makes it based on voting and so forth. Not based on how popular a site is.

Here it is based on a sites popularity (one of the issues I have with Digg). So if a site is big and popular, it will always appear on the home page. No matter if the content is worth a pizzle or not. Even if the post was absolute crap, people on a big site will view it, and that will move it to the home page.

I agree with Mike that this model really needs a lot of work. Currently only helps sites that have massive traffic. The smaller sites will never make the main page. While Mike says the bigger sites will dominate to begin with, I don’t see why they wouldn’t dominate for the long-term.

Or am I missing something?

Marshall,
When I signed up there was an option to choose a tag with no image. The default was an image, but you could change it to “no image”

Let me give you an example.

Let’s assume we had a panel of 10 people who would rate a story on 2 different blogs. Both blogs are in the same content area (doesn’t matter what area)

Blog 1 is a huge mega star blog and writes a post that the 8 raters think is crappy.

Blog 2 is a small blog (1/100th the size) and writes a post that 6 raters this is excellent.

Blog 1 would automatically make the SpotPlex home page, just because they have more traffic.

Blog 2 would never make the SpotPlex home page (unless I guess they got Dugg).

While I am not always a supporter of Digg, I think in this case the Digg model makes more sense.

And from my point of view, this is NOT a Digg Clone.

Hey this is actually really cool.

I guess all the increasing numbers of people who have been complaining about digg recently has somewhere to go to now instead.

Mike, nice to see that you are back in the game in uncovering new innovative startups. I was starting to think that TC had become news.com.

mike, sent you a tip through the “company contact” form or whatever. might be worth posting about.

I think this could work, if their algorithms are reliable - or rather, fair. I think the name is fine too.

Thanks for the heads up;

at least it is not another digg clone. what newscribe is doing might be worth checking out.

boring…this site, using such a script to generate or infer ‘real value’ is in fact much easier to game….

i got an invite code . i was sold to the service. and it’s dugg - slashodtted

oh well…

I can only imagine they get a wave of sign ups right now and it’s smacking their servers really bad. Our site does over a million page views a day, and looking at Tech Crunch’s site meter link in the sidebar, they do a lot of traffic too… I can only imagine if they signed up a lot of big sites it would bring their servers to it’s knees.

Great idea. Let’s see if they can pull it off. Three main problems as I see it:

- Traffic Fraud
- Link Bait
- Relative popularity (As Michael pointed out)

http://www.sumolabs.com/blog/c.....ocial-news

Sam, I really like your suggestion. They could take that even further and assign more weight to diggs from people with criteria you’ve pre-selected. This would go a long way to addressing the most significant issues in Digg. I think the main problem it would address is people digging articles down that they don’t agree with rather than arguing it on the merits. So someone with conservative values would see dugg up an article with a conservative angle and vice versa for liberals. Of course, this would be *much* more resource-intensive server side, but it would be an enormous improvement to the service. Good call dude.

Answer: No.

Ack! looks like our site feed is not going ino their system properly, it’s finding the articles properly on the sidebar, but the main listing is only giving the StreetFire site title.

This is a bit novel and follows another emerging trend. Instead of every one going somewhere and posting, you put in a script in your blog or website, and some kind of auto discovery of stories take place. In principle this is very similar to the Microformat effort (even though unrelated to this specific app). In the case of Microformats, you increase the fidelity of the data by encoding it in a certain format.

The broad trend is lack of repetition. I thought it was tedious to post to 3/4 sites, digg, delicious, furl, reddit etc so may welcome this initiative. Is there a way they can turn this into a Microformat?

The idea sounds decent but there are possible pitfalls. Anyone can easily increase the no of page views by using sites such as autohits. How is spotplex going to counter that.

its interesting but I think the site I’m part of is just as good where the readers of the blog vote on each story and everytime a vote is casted the blog once it has received at least 5votes will show up on the frontpage…

Theres a major flaw with this method. Just because something is read many times it doesn’t mean its any good or worth reading. People “digg” articles that are interesting.

I just got an email from them and they asked for us to take our tags off their site. I think our custom format and large volumes were more than they were ready for. Kudos to the Spotlex team though, they said they want to see what they can do to get us in still, so I’m happy to see they’re supporting their product!

LOL… man, is this idea stupid! Seems smart at first, but when you really think about it it’s so dumb.

It will end up providing the same ol boring ADD-inducing B.S. links Digg has.. waste of time at the end of the day. Plus the concept won’t scale IMO

Does anyone have any idea when this site will go out of beta or how to get an invite? Let me know!

Sigh, they missed a great opportunity. This site, like Digg, is restricted to being a playground site for techie, fratty, 25-40 year old upper-middle class heterosexual white American males. The top categories and top sites — “Tech,” “Business,” “Sports,” “Gaming” — will not appeal to 90% or more of the Internet audience. They wouldn’t even be the most appealing topics to 90% of bloggers. The other “minor” categories are a little more diverse than Digg’s, but barely.

Since socially-based sites’ popularity and usefulness grows geometrically, Spotplex is massively limiting its growth, just like Digg. Best case scenario, this site is exactly as popular as Digg currently is (and that’s if it were to take 100% of Digg’s users).

Haven’t Web 2.0 sites learned anything from MySpace, Youtube, Napster, and every other mainstream Web 2.0 success story? Open your userbase to welcome the masses — from 16-year old hip hop fans to 30 year old mommy/craft bloggers to 55 year old aging hippies — and you don’t even have to have the best technology or most money.

Site must be getting a lot of hits, it’s taking a long time to load the frontpage.

I like the idea but I hope they have a lot of $$. Technically doing what they are trying to do is very capital intensive. Think about it - javascript calls to spotplex and clicks on potentially all of the most popular blogs on the internet have a one to one ratio. Assumably the javascript call is lighter then serving a blog page but even if its 1/100 Spotplex wil need to have a server farm 1% the size of all of the server farms of all of the blogs on the internet. Talk about capital burn rate.

Very interesting idea. I signed my blog-up tonight. I guess I will wait and see how much traction it generates…

$40 — jim…

your assumptions, and information are incorrect. the site will have to make a large number of connections for the jscript calls that it gets from the various links, but it’s nowhere near what you describe.

it’s not the actual size of the articles that is being saved on the spotplex servers. it’s a small amount of text, as well as all the links/counts of the processes that are reading/viewing the articles on the blog servers….

to answer the other statements about the range of topics… if you were to really do a good job focusing on a few of the range of topics of interest to businesses, you’d actually probably have a business that you could use to create targeting advertising for.

you’d be able to say with some degree of certainty that the readers/users of the articles are people with a certain type of background/attributes, assuming you implemented a filtering process based on user attributes/criteria…

this would effectively separate the wheat from the chaff….

peace…

Nice and clean design

You’re kidding me! The homepage is taking forever to load. Plus the name is terrible.

Sounds pretty good project. They have have a bad brand name. Digg’s name is much better.

I don’t think this is going to work at all. Page reads only tell how popular certain site is, not about the article at all. Once there are some more popular sites (like techcrunch), they will dominate the results.

10060 - Connection timeout !
March 1, 2007 - 1055 HRS GMT

You probably never saw my site blogsoftheday.com when it was operating two years ago. It worked on a similar basis. The same technology now powers the Hot Blogs and Hot Posts on the front page of WordPress.com.

After fraud and gaming are under control, the hardest thing to do is tweak the formula to get popular sites on an even keel with the shooting stars of the long tail AND keep the list from getting stale on account of the feedback effect. Good luck to Spotplex!

Hmm, but the success of these high ranking stories in digg/reddit/others are because people can decide…. whatever website can be included. Now this system sounds bit similar to “rank my site” (but for stories).

Oh, and btw - there’s a typo in the headline “Find most visited blog artcles today!”. I suppose “Artcles” should be “articles”.

Anyway, I also wish good luck to Spotplex - hopefully they’ll see success.

First of all, I should say to you all I was pretty embarrassed at our site performance yesterday. Even though I knew there would be huge influx of traffic by getting covered here, I guess we were not fully prepared. We found a few critical errors in some of the codes which we could not find during internal load test. Now the problem is resolved and our site is performing much better.

I believe there are a few benefits of using an impression count as an article popularity measure instead of number of votes. In this system, everybody’s voice counts, not just voters’. In total internet population, I believe only a small number of people vote for articles. In some cases, that small number can represent total population well, but in many cases the result only reflects interest/preference of the small group. Also, since it reflects their interest, the subjects can be limited. I’m not saying the number of impression is the only right measure, but it certainly is unbiased measure and reflects everybody’s opinion and interests. Probably, the best way is to combining these two measures as some of you suggested here, and we will try to implement it for sure.

The number of impression tends to a lot bigger than number of votes an article can get, thus gaming this system is a bit more difficult. We also have a few measures to prevent click-fraud. However, I can not say we prevent gaming 100% and we will have to develop additional measures to improve our system in this area.

I know we have a long way to go and a lot need to be done including the relative popularity measures, tier system, custom blog support, combining with voting system, … Spotplex is going to evolve with your suggestions to provide better service to you all. If you have more suggestion, don’t hesitate to send me an email.

Thanks,

Doyon Kim - CEO

PS: Thanks for your understanding, Adam. We were having problem in handling custom blog format and it was one of the reasons for our struggle. We’ll fix the problem ASAP.

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.