One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that when you get tired for what ever reason of a site, it is usually simple to roll your own site to meet your needs, and probably the needs of many other people.
We spent the afternoon working with Venture Skills instructions for building your own Drupal based social voting site. Moreover, found them very complete and easy to do. Although we also have a lot of experience with Drupal and building a Drupal site, there are some things we did differently than we have normally done.
We used an external hosting company to simulate the average person who does not own their own gear, and used the MySQL php based administrative pages to put it together. As well as then immediately disabling it once the installation was done. As well we had to modify the node-storylink.tpl.php file to remove a second call to the voting widget, otherwise we ended up with two voting views on one page that was confusing.
The good part about it is that just about anyone can bang together a Digg like or Reddit like web site in an afternoon (about 4 hours) if they have knowledge of Drupal, and has some code debugging knowledge.
Web 2.0 should be this simple, because a business idea is all about solving a pain point. Lately there has been a lot of attention focused on Digg and Reddit because of what they have been doing with killing links or other forms of censorship. It shows that those sites are growing up in some ways, and in other ways that they have had to start dealing with the bigger world. This is the chart from Techwag
An interesting break down of the way that Digg buries articles was done this morning over at Techwag, and the graphic is below for the reason that articles were buried in Digg for the last 10,000 articles they had buried.
Digg burying is not all that bad, it is still in the system, but it will never make it to the top of the page basically because it will be harder to find. While blocking spam, blocking duplicate or inaccurate articles is not a bad thing, the category lame really stood out, 32% of all killed articles were labeled lame, and 39% were labeled spam by Digg. Those are some pretty large numbers when dealing with the last 10,000 entries.
So if you are upset at Digg for killing off your article, from experience we know that you can make a pretty decent Digg clone in 4 or 5 hours depending on your skills. You can visit the Digg clone that we made here, you can visit the techwag article that breaks down the stories by reason over here at techwag.
