Michi Knows

A new site called Spotplex launched today. The premise is simple: automate Digg-like story ranking by putting the blog entries with the most views at the top. As in, a blog owner installs their tracker image and then Spotplex watches how many people read your post.

Update: see comments.

This model is flawed because small blogs will continue to remain small while big blogs will only get bigger. If a big site like Techcrunch were to try this out, every article they wrote would dominate the headlines. Right now, their #2 article has only 250 views - Reputable blogs get that in minutes.

Something must be done to their overly simple ranking algorithm to ensure the site doesn’t become an extension of larger blogs. For example, the site could handicap blogs that continue to spam the front page. Or perhaps the rankings could be based on daily net change so that heavy, but consistent traffic weighs less than smaller, but sudden traffic spikes.

Installation is a breeze: all you do is place their image somewhere in your blog template and you’re done. As an added bonus, it tracks usage history of your blog.

The model is extremely attractive to blog owners, but I imagine the site has a while before any mainstream audience picks it up. In other words, right now, it is a traffic exchange network. Either way, I’ve installed it. I’ll watch my traffic over the next few days to see how many readers (other bloggers) it brings in.