Finally a Digg Just for Bloggers?
Many people have been complaining lately about Digg. The “bury-brigade”, who bury stories just because they don’t like the subject matter, and bullying trolls who tear apart anything just for sport.
Digg do not seem to want to do anything about it either, Kevin and co seem quite happy that they are pulling together an audience of loud-mouth halfwits who like anonymously inflicting pain and upset. They say a community follows the pattern set by the founders … 
There might be an alternative brewing though. Ashish and John have let me know of their new digg-like project just for bloggers called Blogg-Buzz
Blogg-Buzz is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting!
It looks like it could be just the thing bloggers need, I am impressed. Other than the name, blogg not blog? Hyphen? - I think it could be very useful 
Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Chris Garrett in News
“For the price of one cup of coffee a day, you can sponsor a blogger…”
Love it!
Just regular coffee? Nothing fancy? Tall, grande, venti?
(Seriously, I’ve got your coffee, but what’s up with that Blogg-Buzz link? Is the site slow-loading or broken? My connection seems to be fine.)
In the meantime, check out our version of Blog Buzz. It finds the top stories according to relevance and links over a 24hr cycle. We manage it a bit, but it’s pretty self-correcting. So, it’s community driven, but not in a way that’s obviously democratic.
I am partial to a caramel macchiato, grande (I am not greedy
)
The site was working fine for me earlier but I expect they have been getting a fair amount of attention and they are only in alpha
Good find Chris. I did not know about blogg-buzz, think I will look into it.
Also Guy Kawasaki has started a social site here: http://www.truemors.com/
I’m not sure what I think of it - seems like Reddit and Twitter mixed together… I don’t know…
The site doesn’t load for me, too.
IMO, Digg has so much momentum now that it will be the de facto leader in that space for at least a little longer, and using most new sites will seem like a waste of time to bloggers. People will continue to use the leader because of the Law (that I can’t recall the name to right now) which states that, with the more people using a website, the more value it has for people. Digg has so many people that even with a small number of Diggs, your site has a huge chance of getting a fairly good ROI for your relatively short time spent submitting stories.
It looks like one of the hundreds of Pligg-based sites that seem to pop up everyday. I should know, since I have one of them
You are not going to beat digg, or reddit, su, etc. You better have a niche to be successful. Or a lot of money. Or you need to fulfill a need or gap in a current product. Is blogging in general a niche or gap? Maybe, but doubtful. We get most of our submissions at Babblz from blogs, but we are promoting those with a focus on parenting and family.
I was of the impression that Digg traffic was of pretty poor quality. So why bother with it. If diggers don’t take any actions on your site that you want them to, then you’re just going out for some vanity web stats.
Actions on web sites are what matter and the actions change depending upon the site, page views are pretty close to being irrelevant.
@Mark - I think true rumours is interesting for a visit but not something I would return to, not sure what the benefit is. And my Mum told me never to spread rumours
@Gary - I think network effects do come into play but the niche alternatives will have a more focused audience and therefore better conversion rates and less chance of being buried
@Jack - Digg traffic comes like a tornado, getting them to take an action is like trying to stand in front of that tornado and catch what flies past - can be done but don’t expect a lot. I wrote a post about it. Conversion rates might be low but the sheer amount of visitors makes it worthwhile. Blogs such as http://freelanceswitch.com/ and digital-photography-school the benefits of regular diggings have been huge.
@Chris: Thanks for all your support man.!!!
Opps.. I think it’s similar with what HighFivez offers, I blogged about it .
The problem with this “run by bloggers” social sites, IMHO, is that there’s not much quality control. Basically *everybody* can dig or highfive or buzz *any* article, so we see a lot of non-relevant stuff, antique posts (that the authors submitted because nobody commented on those posts, etc.).
Ouh well, it’s just my two cents
Though I hope the new site takes off, I must admit the odds are stacked against. Digg generates so much traffic that it just commands attention, even given the relative problems with comments and burying. Sometimes I use reddit which is like digg’s little brother, but a frontpage reddit doesn’t garner nearly as much traffic as digg and so I keep going back.
As Chris says our blog FreelanceSwitch did profit immensely from digg traffic though perhaps its because digg users are in our target group.
One other point on the digg traffic is that its good for your advertisers, having more traffic always means more click throughs, even if its not in the same ratios as other types of traffic.
Anyhow i’m going to go buzz some things on the new site
I typically try to avoid “clone” sites but Blogg-Buzz might have something here. The thing I hate about sites like Digg is that they typically target news type articles…so a Digg-like site geared towards bloggers might work. I checked out Blogg-Buzz the other day and it looks like they have a solid setup over there. I know they are in Alpha right now but I did wish that they would offer an automated sign-up system though.
Speaking of Digg-like sites…I recently ran across another interesting site called Tweako. This site also has a Digg-like promotion system but is geared towards technology tutorials. They have some great information over there as well and are geared towards a newbie audience (so I was able to find a lot of useful info). Check it out when you have a chance.
Good find Chris. I’ve joined this morning (as anotherjunction) and I’ll see how it develops.
Is it built upon pligg anyone know?
Hey, thanks for the tip, Chris. I’ve also been experimenting with Netscape’s social voting features recently, as well as Technorati’s WTF.
-TimK
Thanks for letting us know! I love it - I’m seeing more and more of these type places spring up. Glad to see one just for bloggers.
Interesting article. Lately there seems to be a lot of reports that Digg are being gamed.
On occasion I have found a drug related site that had 50+ diggs. For me I personally prefer Reddit better although I don’t know if it is also can be gamed.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out. I’m pretty new to all of this myself but I did notice that there’s no category on Digg for blogs. This should be a nice alternative.