Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

Shoutwire vs Digg

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From time to time, people demand suggest that Tomorrow.sg and Blogsmalaysia move from a editor moderated model to the Digg.com model where the readers vote to decide what gets published on the main page. Digg.com has gotten so popular that it is about to overtake the venerable Slashdot.org in terms of traffic.

Then Shoutwire debuts and is a complete clone copy of Digg.com – enraging the loyal readers, who descend upon the hapless clone and inundate it with spam as seen in the image above which was taken just before they deleted all the malicious posts.

I know you all are going to ask me if I think Tomorrow.sg and Blogsmalaysia should follow the Digg.com model. My answer is “Not right now”.

I tend to agree for the moment. The local blogosphere might not be ready for the Digg model of democratic content management yet. Given the size and theme of topics on SG’s blogosphere, a moderated group blog like Tomorrow.sg seems to work well.

It would be exciting to see a Digg-like site for Singapore where everyone’s involved instead of a few A-list bloggers. However, as you mentioned, this can be prety risky business. Like Wikipedia, Digg and Shoutwire are open-access systems which is great for community involvement, but is prone to exploitation (e.g. spamming by googlebombing). Digg was also spammed last week by fans of competing services.

BTW: There’s a great discussion on Digg.com vs. Shoutwire.com. Both are essentially different in that:
- Digg.com is purely tech related
- Shoutwire.com is about almost everything

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CowboyCaleb was quick enough to take this screenshot of Shout [...]