Spotplex — the Digg Killer that Isn’t

Spotplex aspires to be the next Digg-killer.

But it’s not.

I found their idea intriguing — list posts according to their number of views, as opposed to the number of times they get Dugg, which obviously is subject to rampant gaming.

So I’ve been playing around with their widget the last 2 days, since their beta started.

It doesn’t work. As some predicted in TechCrunch comments, Spotplex simply gives prominence to the most trafficked blogs. Which completely defeats the purpose. I already know where to find TechCrunch. I’ll use a service like Digg or TechMeme or Spotplex to find good stuff that emerges from the bowels of the blogosphere that I might not have read otherwise. Not to find out that posts from the most widely read blogs are — surprise! — the most widely read posts.

I was, however, surprised to learn that gay news daily is the most popular blog on spotplex.

I am pretty interested in the general concept of a service that does Digg, but better. I’m spending some time with a venture that aspires to do just that, and I think may just be onto somethin…

Spotplex

I am trying out a new widget from Spotplex. Spotplex is a new Digg competitor. As Arrington reported, though, Spotplex cleverly avoids Digg’s vote fraud problem: instead of having readers vote on articles, bloggers enable their blog with the Spotplex widget, which automatically counts the number of views each post gets and lists popular posts on the Spotplex site.

Let’s see if VCMike ever makes it above the fold on Spotplex!