If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Digg would be at the top of the heap. The site that popularized social news has been copied, cloned and even spawned Pligg, an open source Digg style script.
If Pligg opened up Digg style clones to site hosts and developers, coRank takes the concept to the mass market; users who either can’t or don’t want to host Pligg on their own domain. coRank is to Digg clones what Blogger once was for blogging.
coRank has evolved from its earlier incarnation as a stand alone Digg clone. The new coRank is now a fully customizable hosted social voting platform. Users can set up social news sites through easy to use menu options without the need to edit code. Like Blogger there is a range of templates available, including one that looks just like Digg. The options are surprisingly broad. Users can customize everything from the name of voting members through to the names given to the actual voting system. Everything from user banning through to privacy options and user statistics has been included.
Although the entire morality of an army of Digg clones may be a passionate topic for debate, there’s little doubt that social news continues to grow. Ethics aside coRank is a notable point in the progression of social news development. In time coRank is an idea that is sure to be cloned itself.
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Or you can just build your own - the basic format is not overly complex - submission, voting, commenting, etc. Of course Digg does much more and the back-end is obviously complex.
Here is one example: http://www.popchatter.com - Digg for Celebrity Gossip
This will make VC angry who invest Digg. LOL. hahahaha. brillant move.
Ryan
agreed, but not everyone has that skill set. I never used Blogger, started with self hosted Greymatter then MT then WP, yet Blogger was wildly popular, I see the difference with coRank in a similar way.
lol. hahahhahah,
Digg’s technology is not what gives it value, it’s its community.
Pointless. Digg already has the network effect going for it, unless non-techies eventually believe that all news should be democratized.
http://www.kinggary.com/
A more useful use for this would be as a CRM system like Dell’s IdeaStorm or Salesforce’s IdeaExchange.
This is a prefect off the shelf social news function for community-centric vertical sites like ours. We’ll start taking a hard look at it on Tuesday. Cool! My guess is that niched category sites will replicate Digg’s geek-centric sweetspot for their specific audience segment. Thnx…Casey Kazan, editor/co-founder.
I have used coRank a little bit. It’s kind of different to Digg. It has potential but will never knock Digg off the number 1 spot.
Its normal inspirations. Earlier GMail was the inspiration of Microsoft outlook. Now coRank got inspired from Digg. lol
Anyways, did you know my girlfriend is good at smelling money?
Everytime I open my wallet. I have zeros in it and left out small gum wapper, papers, and toe nail. Generally, not because I’m poor or rised in violent town or trailer trash town. It’s usually high cost food, milk, rent, and gas prices. Half my town got pretty exhausting working 24/7 week with very low wage. It’s almost like suicide darky town. Half of workers at my town tried to create better life. They couldn’t. They were watching war with Iraq news on TV and stupid loud mouth rosie o donnel calling u.s troops as terrorist. Kids took their way to military school bus. Some soliders came home with missing legs and arms. But why? Why this kind of life? Why listen to rich hypocrites?
I’m living very sad and quiet town. The business is good and friendly. Banks were not so friendly. There is not much accessbility for small business loans or seed loans. I have no idea not how to rise capital around my unpopular town. My town isn’t called “silicon valley”. I tried to run my own WEB 2.0 stuff on line. I’m still learning to program.
Now, is good idea to clone million dollar web application? I think it’s good idea to clone an web application. So we can create little or better economy around people’s town. Digg got VC money. Sometimes you can’t get VC around your area, state, and your unnamed cities. Venture capitalist don’t give damn who you are. They only attracted to highly educated people and rich people.
Frankly, I don’t give them what VC says. Walt disney, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison don’t have college degree. They are billionaire. Why not copy… copy… copy idea? Are you afriad of copyright infragment?
You should be.. you should create little differnet product and mock the rich people and educated people.
Stephen, Gary and Spuds:
I don’t think the new “build your own social news site” service from coRank is so much about building a large community it doesn’t yet has than about providing a service to existing communities.
What we’re seeing is people who are using the new coRank as an add-on to their existing services, be it a social network, a vertical portal, or even a Yahoo Groups, a blog, etc. In those cases, the community is already there, but now they can do more. So I think it’s more about bringing this tool to a level it didn’t exist before (unless you’re willing to either code it yourself, hire someone to do it or pay for hosting somewhere and install Pligg).
I could doing without voting and social. I’d like a tool that saves URLs and a copy of the bookmarked page.
We’re doing something similar with an application we’re calling SocialPoll.
One experiment running on this software is http://www.DailyHub.com. It’s a social content site for business geeks.
The manifesto on DailyHub might be interesting for those interested in the niche-market social content site concept.
Torsten , the “and a copy of the bookmarked URL” is a tricky proposition.
Technically it’s not hard to do at all. In fact, coRank does check if the submitted pages are live by retrieving a copy of them (it just doesn’t store them anywhere), but how would the creators of the content in those pages would feel if they know that their content is being copied and stored somewhere else? Some might be ok with it, but chances are many won’t.
I’m all up for it and I myself would love to have such tool, but from a 3rd party service IMHO I think that’s asking for trouble down the road.
RBA, this is something which will fit in well as an add-on for existing sites which already have decent traffic.
You have any plans to offer some integration an minor customisation etc? Or anyone else who can work with you?
For example, we have been considering something like this to vote on stories in our own site for a while. We got stuck because we may need further features tomorrow, like an integration with a forum, or our own social network etc.
This thing is not competing with Digg at all.
Just add an rss feed to post option and the ability to set user access to these things.
You might just end up with a great product to share corporate information
Matt, we’re already working on an API that should be very helpful for what you’re suggesting. Indeed, as I mentioner earlier, we’re aware that integration with existing sites and services is a plus.
Thierry, I agree with you that coRank doesn’t compete with Digg (which btw is a good thing :-). And your suggestion is also something that’s in the top of the to-do list. I’d say that your suggestion, the API and an OPML import tool are the top three priorities now.
Torsten,
just check favorit.es .
Although in private beta, you will be able to save a bookmarked url as pdf and get the content indexed among a lot of other features.
Younews (http://www.younews.in/) is another Digg clone trying to grab the Indian online news reading market with localised content!
Yes, a mass market user-base is something that makes a site special like Digg, but so can specialization and a sense of ownership. coRank is allowing custom domains which is where things are heading in personal and community publishing.
The guys at CrispyNews already did this. Creating private-label Diggs just wasn’t a great business, unless hooked into an existing social network. Facebook or LinkedIn should implement this.
CrispyNews eventually used their engine for CRM type stuff and sold out to Salesforce.com.
Pligg - is not very hard to work with and could be considered the best base to start with as far as this type of software goes…
basic knowledge of sites is needed on ANY site..
Nukepuppy, you’d be surprised to know how many people use services like YahooGroups to build an alternative communications channel for their existing community instead of say, installing Mailman or Ezmlm.
Some people may want to start with a free and quick alternative that works, rater than getting into the tasks of paying for a hosting service, installing the software, keeping up with the updates, etc. I just wouldn’t say that X is “the best way” (X being coRank or Pligg) because it depends on many things and everyone’s needs are different. Wordpress may be “the best” way to run a blog, but look at Blogger or MSN Spaces! (granted, a blog isn’t the same as a social news site). It’s not a billion dollars market, but if it covers the needs of say 100 communities, I’m happy, really.
I’d seen RBA’s comments here and there, but never knew what corank was. I understand the value proposition for social news sites, targeted at a niche, there are lots of possibilities in the business world. While digg gets lots of credit in this area, it is an oversight not to consider SLASHDOT the originator of the general idea, their implementation just wasn’t as appealing (eg low-barrier) to as significant an addressable market.
Hasn’t mynn.com had that feature for over a year?
While playing around with CoRank I created what could be called the *reverse* digg: submit and vote on stuff that sucks… called DoggIt…
http://doggit.corank.com/
– MV
The idea of increasing value to an existing community (web site, blog, email list) by quickly adding social voting makes sense. At work and home I can think of a few different places to try this out.
There is a lot of use for something like this, especially in enterprise 2.0 deployment.
Going through Digg to sift through news is not exactly the best way to see what everyone in a specific company is viewing, or to bubble up relevant news. As a social bookmarking and intelligence tool this is great. Deploying this behind a firewall with only set addresses would be the solution that I’m looking for.
Is there Sharepoint integration for this?
It is Digg like, but as much as I love Digg it was just luck of the draw that Digg caught on. Just like MySpace, Facebook and all the others there is a huge dose of luck that get them rolling. Even if coRank was just like Digg or even better and 1000 people created sites only a select few would have mediocre results compared to Digg.
Great idea. I think I’ll try it. You guys at TechCrunch are really on the ball. Thanks for the info.
thank for share
oh good idea
#24 - I’m definitely here and there and everywhere
#27 indeed that’s where we see this service can add value and I myself am already using it for both, a small community I’m part of, and a business project.
#28 we do not offer an in-the-box installable package, at least not yet, but sites can already be configured so that only members can access them, and membership is moderated, so you can really have a site only available to whomever you want. Regarding integration, we’ll be launching an API soon that should be very useful for integrating the service with other platforms.
#29 I honestly doubt anyone will build a site in coRank that gather significant critical mass to even bother Digg, but as we’ve been saying, I don’t think that’s why people are creating their own ’social news’ sites in coRank.
Is anybody running out there and grabbing those free sub-domains off of coRank? They’ve limited it to 3, but just bumped it up to 5… I wonder how well these pages will do under the search engines?
i think pligg is the best !
http://netv.eb.cn/
Jack - which one is best out of these two? Movable Type or TypePad?
Hi, i know another digg clone maker service,
@newz
http://atnewz.com/
try this!