Future RSS aggregator possibilities

February 20, 2007

Was just thinking a bit ago that ‘digg’ is  all about user generated content, yet it’s all submitted via the ‘digg’ links and such.  A little hokey since anyone can submit anything in to the queue of ‘upcoming’ stories to get voted on.  Why not bypass the submission process and just focus on voting?  Take something like technorati, and have all the latest posts go in to a queue for people to vote up or ‘promote’ to the front page, digg style.  I think techmeme does the first half, by focusing just on a particular small segment (tech blogs).  What would we end up if techmeme adopted digg-stye voting?

The first obvious response to this is that that would just be too much information to sift through to make good judgements about what’s on the ‘front page’.  It looks like digg already has taken steps to deal with this by having multiple ‘front pages’ for different categories (sports, entertainment, business, etc).  But at some point, they’ll need to modify the current strategy (perhaps that’s just too obvious of a statement?) because there’s just too much for people to sift through.  It’s 11pm on a Tuesday night, and there’s 6000+ posts waiting for people to vote on them.  I see a couple options here - well, after thinking about it, it’s probably just a couple different twists rolled up in to one option. 
Limit a visitor’s view of the pending items to something smaller, but randomly select ones for each user’s session.  Being able to view all pending items could be a click away, but by default, present a smaller subset for people to vote on.  That subset could be determined based on the type of stories ( based on text/tag similarities?) a user has promoted before.  If I’ve promoted an article on a particular topic before, I probably have more interest or knowledge in that topic than others, and may be more qualified to judge its merits than other topics (or someone else judging said topic).

OK, I guess I’m not suggesting completely bypassing the ‘digg it!’ buttons on content, but automatically adding blog/generated content to the digg queue then giving people an easier way to search/sort/use that items in that queue is what I’m going after.  Crossing a techmeme-style industry focused aggregator plus digg-style voting would be useful, and that’s what I’m envisioning.

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