Digg has had a hard week. What with Technosailor's (anti) Digg Week and Wired news, admittedly arguably immorally, exposing the ability to buy diggs. Now they have a new competitor, one that can't be bought and won't suffer from Digg's other flaws. Spotplex is a similar system, but it ranks articles on how many page views it gets in a certain time period.

What is Spotplex?

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. It is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

Spotplex VS Digg

On the surface, it looks like Spotplex is just a Digg clone with a different voting method, but in reality it is very different. Digg users submit stories for others to vote on, Spotplex only works on sites which sign up and place the Spotplex code on their site (see the button in my sidebar). When anyone reads an article, Spotplex knows and updates its count. The more votes an article gets on Digg the higher it appears on the site, the more pageviews and reads an article gets the higher it appears on Spotplex. Digg is full of articles submitted by members, but Spotplex shows the most popular articles on sites that have signed up to it.

The results are similar, even displayed the same, with popular and upcoming sections. Spotplex also provides lists of popular posts based on tags, even popular tags of the day, but the methods of reaching these results are what sets Spotplex apart.

In Theory

Spotplex sounds to me like a good idea, removing the power of top Diggers as well as so-called Bury Brigades and leaving the the popular articles to rise organically. Can it really help though? A blog like mine, with my current traffic, will never reach the top of Spotplex when compared to the pageviews of any large blog out there. Everton Blair, at Connected Internet, harbours similar fears, but in Techcrunch's review, Michael Arrington mentions how he thinks this could be overcome and the Spotplex team have said that they will be tweaking their algorithms through the beta to ensure fairness.

The Digg Effect

Another of my worries about this idea is pure effect that the already established Digg will have on Spotplex. Currently a story that reaches the front page of Digg will send thousands upon thousands of hits to a single page, often crashing servers. This sort of traffic will presumably send an article to the top of Spotplex almost immediately too. The Spotplex most popular could become a carbon copy of the Digg front page. I would like to know how Spotplex plan to deal with this too?

Good Luck!

I think that, if the above issues are addressed (and that's what a beta is for, isn't it), Spotplex can become a force for good among social sites in this vein. Rewarding popular articles with more popularity can only be a good thing. Spotplex is in beta at the moment, but anyone can view the results so far. To help the launch and beta along, they are allowing up to 1,000 blogs into Spotplex. It's probably a bit late to advertise this, but email [email protected] to apply to take part. I got my code today and implemented the button in my sidebar soon after. I look forward to seeing how the system grows and (hopefully) how it affects my traffic. I'll be reporting on this again soon, in the meantime, have a look and let me know your first impressions. Will you swap Digg for Spotplex? Will they complement each other or will there be only one winner? Can Spotplex even touch Digg?