Tony Hung has written an interesting post about articles getting buried on Digg, reflecting on the 'black box' that determines how easy it is for a group of people to bury articles or even entire sites:
"Digg needs to have its population police its own content, because it doesn’t have the manpower (two guys at last count) to try and do it themselves. This leaves room for enormous abuse, as individuals can bury stories with abandon and get entire domains banned with little recourse to getting them reinstated, since the a large part of the process is automated.
The Montoya Herald writes that he's tired of Technorati, frustrated that it's become to commercialised. He's not keen on the content on the front page, tracking the most talked about subjects.
"I want Technorati to help me find new blogs, not old news."
he writes, adding:
"Another thing that bothers me is the ways that Technorati ranks blogs. The first way is by number of inbound links, which isn’t really a good measure of a blog’s success. The number of people linking to you doesn’t translate to the number of readers you have or the amount of traffic you get, just to how much linkbait you use."
To a point, that's true.
"The other way is by number of users who have added you as a favorite, which I used to think was a good, honest measure of ranking blogs until I found out that bloggers are gaming the system."
Users gaming the system is always going to be a problem to some extent on any social bookmarking site. He concludes:
"But what bothers me the most about Technorati (to make a short rant long) is the fact that in all the time that I’ve know the site, it has done nothing to help me find great new blogs. Technorati does a great job of telling you all the blogs that are already immensely popular (which, coincidentally, I heard enough about without Technorati’s help), but it does nothing to highlight new bloggers who are living the Z-list dream."
Interesting thoughts.
TechCrunch reports on the launch of Wikiseek, a search engine for Wikipedia sites. WikiSeek has been built with the support of Wikipedia. What would be great is a search engine that searches a large number of wikis, and perhaps able to search a niche subset of them. Maybe that will come.
Profy announces the public launch of Boxxet, which sounds like a topical blog aggregator.
Boxxet is actually all about compilation. It is intended to create various frequently updated topical "Boxxets" - collections of images, blogs, RSS feeds, search results, etc. The Boxxets are created and edited by users assisted by a special search engine. The Boxxets resemble frequently updated topical blogs - but they are updated automatically even if their authors do not write a single word.
Sounds interesting, though issues surrounding copyright may well surface, particularly if and when Boxxet decide to try to monetise their site.
TechCrunch reports on the beta launch of Nimbuzz Talk, a mobile/PC application that connects mobile and PC users. Sounds interesting, but US only at present.