Spotplex: a selective Digg

Spotplex is an interesting take on social-voting sites. If you're familiar with Digg's system of user voting for story promotion, you'll notice that Spotplex takes a slightly different approach, counting click-throughs per link to promote stories to the front page. For blogs or Web site owners, submitting stories is automatic if you add a piece of code to your site. Spotplex then crawls and adds your content to the list of upcoming stories.

Spotplex has an arguably better system for site owners to add stories and to keep track of how popular a story is without using third-party analytics. The system becomes problematic with obscure links, which are common of Digg front page content. There's also a lack of editorial freedom when compared to submitting a story to a site like Digg or Netscape, where you can create your own description and add relevance to the site's readership.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Interestingly enough, Spotplex has employed tags instead of categories, which Digg users often find limiting. Spotplex stories can have several tags, which leaves the possibility for abuse or mislabeling.

What currently limits the Spotplex system is the lack of user interaction. There's no way to comment or effectively disagree with a story that's been posted. From a content provider standpoint, this is great, as it forces visitors to use your comment system and interact with your site. However, as a Digg user, I will often read a popular story or link I don't think is very interesting and want to talk about it in the same place I found it, something that Spotplex currently can't do.

Keep an eye on this one.

[Found on TechCrunch]