Jul 14, 2007

An alternative besides DiGG, Netscape



Social bookmarking is something that most of us get involved with nowadays if you are a blogger. Backtracking myself a little bit, let me first explain to you what a social bookmarking is. A social bookmarking is basically where all the bloggers chunk up in groups to unify themselves therefore visitors of their websites may spread to other bloggers and in the end it increases exposures to everyone that is involved in the social network. You can look at it in similarity to electronics section of Wal-mart, instead of selling just one brand of electronic, there are varieties of electronics for the customers to select thus brings in more audience and exposure.

Out of all the social bookmarking websites, one of the most well known website out there is named DiGG. Why DiGG? Well, beyond just being a place where it gathers bloggers it provides an additional "voting system" for its visitors. In another words, not only will the visitors get to view the blogs in that website it also gets to vote who's got a better blog or story as well. With more votes on the story the better chance it has to get into the front page of DiGG, thus it creates a unforeseen incentive for bloggers to blog better so they can get into the front page of their website. Partially because of pride, partially because it provides maximum exposure for the blogger since that's the reason why they've joined such community in the first place.

Well, you can kinda see where this is going. With more community members come with people that will abuse the idea. Before I get into it, can you think of any ideas to abuse it? The idea is not too complicated and that is to abuse Digg's system of voting for a story. What people end up doing is they've started paying people to vote for their article and thus creating a lot of artificial votes and corrupting the sites' original intent. The front page articles at Digg becomes less quality and basically destroys the system. So, instead of camping with DiGG there's another site which I would like to introduce and that's Netscape. Surprising enough, I don't hear many people talking about it and it is definitely a hidden gem.

Netscape as a site has been around for ages from being an internet browser almost 15 years ago to now a site very similar to Digg. The biggest difference between the two is that with Netscape, you'll have to submit your stories to them instead of installing a widget in your website which others vote on instead. It is very different then Digg in its limiting method for article submissions. Through this limitation however, it allows Netscape to monitor articles that are being submitted and voted thus provide a stronger policing system to prevent abuse. Netscape also provides another type of policing system which allows users to report abuse on the articles or potential abusive activities posted by the user. This is great because no one wants to see others get ahead of them with methods of cheating when they've spent all day writing one thus it provides benefit to those who report abuse. At the end of the day when it comes down to abuse, anyone can always go around it if they really really try in any type of system in place. However, in comparison with other social bookmarking websites I definitely think Netscape has one of the best systems out by far to monitor articles. It has a lot of potentials and it is definitely not a place where you should miss to get your blog exposed. -Swapw


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