Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

JS-Kit provides some of the simplest tools around for adding threaded comments, post reviews, and polls to your web site. All you have to do is install two or three lines of code to your blog or web site template and JS-Kit will do the heavy lifting. On the downside, since the code basically calls up a JavaScript application from JS-Kit’s servers, some portions of your site might load a little slowly, and if JS-Kit ever goes down, there goes your comment system.

Now JS-Kit has added a new Score tool that lets visitors to your site give content a thumbs up or down. You can also install a Navigator widget which you can then place in a prominent position on your site to let visitors find the most popular stories quickly.

[via Mashable]

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Publish2, the stealth Digg-Clone-For-Journalists that announced a fundraising this morning, is being very quiet about exactly what their product is and how it works. In an interview last week they told me only friends and family were testing it.

Well, it turns out “friends and family” is fairly expansive term in their book, and includes a lot of people who are quite willing to talk about it. As we said, Publish2 is a Digg-like site where anyone can submit links but only journalists can vote those links up and down. It also has a private research feature that lets journalists bookmark items without sharing them. “It’s like Delicious,” said one person testing the service, adding “I would never use the public part of the service, I’m too competitive to share my research with other journalists.”

So Publish2 looks to be a little like Digg and a little like Delicious. The only problem is that it may not be as good as either of those products.

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New startup Publish2 hasn’t launched or even entered private beta yet, but the company has scored $2.75 million in funding. The investor, Velocity Interactive Group, believes in the idea so much that they put both Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller on the board of directors.

Publish2 is talking freely about the product, they just won’t show it to anyone yet. The idea is to create a news resource for news rooms, who are increasingly stressed due to headcount cuts and competition with blogs.

The main service will be a Digg-like social bookmarking site, says CEO Scott Karp. Like Digg, anyone can submit a link to a news story. But the only people who can vote on stories are pre-approved journalists. The goal, he says, is to avoid Digg’s spamming issues and ensure that only quality news can get to the top in any category. He says it’s “Digg, powered by journalists.”

It’s sort of the opposite of Yahoo Buzz, which launched last month, in its approach. Buzz only takes links from pre-approved sites, but anyone can vote. Top stories must pass through an editor, though, before going to the Yahoo home page.

It seems that everyone has tried one variation or another of Digg. In addition to Buzz, AOL launched Propeller in 2006, which also required editors to approve top stories. And there are others with models that fall somewhere in between.

Publish2 will also allow newsrooms to use the service to create customized headline feeds Presumably the quality will be high because only journalists get to vote stories up. That may be true. But it’s just as likely Publish2 will end up a ghost town. One of the main reasons for Digg’s success was the viral way stories spread. People send stories to their friends to get them to Digg them up. Those people, seeing Digg perhaps for the first time, may come back to read the news. Publish2 won’t have that benefit.

We’ll withhold judgment until the product launched and we can take a look for ourselves.

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Episode 143 of Diggnation: Hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht announce the sale of Revision3 to Fox News at about the 2:05 mark. Rose says “Well, ah, we basically have a big announcement for everyone. Revision3 has been acquired by a bigger company. We’ll be moving to Fox News.” He added “I’m thinking of getting a fox tattoo, its kinda part of my signing bonus, if i do it i get a little extra money.”

It’s an early (very early) April Fool’s joke, of course. Jump to the 3:45 mark. They are clearly playing off a story from two weeks ago, spread quickly via a credulous Robert Scoble Twitter message, that CNET had acquired Revision3 for $58 million.

The company was founded in April 2005 and has raised $9 million in funding.

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Mixx, a Digg-like site that ranks news stories based on reader voting, will launch a new “breaking news” feature later today that should get real news onto the home page very, very fast. More on that below.

Since launching just last September, Mixx has been on a tear to release new products. Groups came in December, followed by private mail in Februrary. Also in February they released a clustering feature that I think would fix a big problem at Digg - duplicate stories describing the same event. With the new feature, other users could add different but related stories to the main news item. This removes the need for Duelling stories and it gives the reader more content on the stuff they just clicked on.

So today they’re releasing yet another new feature. Like the others, it’s worth a little thought. The goal is to get the really hot news up to the home page very quickly and without having to go through the normal vote gathering process, which can take up to 24 hours before a story makes it to the home page. To get this special treatment, A special user, called a Super Mixxer (here’s how you become a Super Mixxer), must tag a story as Breaking. Once a story has been tagged by two Super Mixxers, the story goes to the home page under the Breaking News area. The story will continue to build up votes and move into the general Popular area of the page at that time. Others may drop off entirely.

For now only text stories can be Breaking, although they will add more story types over time.

This is different from how Digg handles things. Nothing gets special treatment until its gone through the normal voting procedure. Once it’s a top page story, though, if it continues to do well it can move over to the Top story in whatever topic is being viewed. So Mixx is getting the best news to the home page very, very quickly. Whereas Digg likes to make it tough to get on the home page at all, but then find ways for the really good stuff to stay there even longer.

I think the Mixx feature is a great way to make sure that breaking news gets to the home page extremely fast, possibly hours before it goes popular on Digg The key pressure points are whether the Super Mixxers are in fact all that Super. And if they are willing to take the time to constantly scan incoming news for relevant stuff. Another thing to think about - if this model works and traffic grows substantially at the site, look out for the guys that will want to pay the Super Mixxers to vote for their stuff.

It is just one more feature that I like and that Digg doesn’t have or show much inclination to build. At some point Mixx is going to have their very onw big audience for social voted news, second only to Digg in reach.

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There’s a joke that no good Web 2.0 service has come of age until there’s a script available to clone it. Digg has Pligg, Popurls has ezUrls (both predated AllTop). Now Twitter has ReVou.

ReVou promises “Twitter clone software made affordable” for $399 as a self hosted script. The script offers all of Twitters features, including SMS support, and even comes with its own API. The only question then becomes is why would you want to host your own Twitter? This is what ReVou says:

Existing site owners can benefit from running a micro blogging service resulting in more viral growth for your website when your users interact with follow friends by receiving updates via our social network platform. With our SMS integration as well as custom API, we allow you to gain more revenues through purchase of SMS credits, revenues from web advertisements and as well benefiting from 3rd party applications built for your site using our API.

Naturally I’m a little skeptical but there is a thriving marketplace for Digg style voting sites, with some services (Sphinn comes to mind) doing particularly well in various verticals. Perhaps there’s no reason why Twitter clones might not have some success, be it as stand alone sites or more likely integrated into existing membership based sites.

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There’s some chatter today on Hacker News and Profy about a new site called Numbrosia. Unlike Digg, stories are not ranked via user voting.

Instead, users solve math puzzles that get progressively harder. The higher their score, the higher their submitted news items appear. The exact number of points for an item is the recent score divided by the number of submitted links, so it makes sense for users to submit just a single story.

There’s no business here, and we’ll likely never touch on Numbrosia again. But I like the creativity, and sometimes seeing something like this creates the seed of a new idea in others. Plus, puzzle addicts will likely waste an afternoon on the site.

Perhaps intelligent testing could help other sites reduce spam or otherwise improve their service.

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The New York Times tonight added Mixx bookmarking buttons on its site, which is an important milestone for the company. Facebook, Digg and Yahoo Buzz are the only other third party social bookmarking services that are offered.

The NYTimes doesn’t include well known and more established services like Delicious, Reddit and others on its pages. And since Mixx is only six months old, so this is an important sign of confidence in the young startup.

An example is here, just click on the “share” button to the right of the article.

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Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.

Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer - see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.

Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.”

Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost.

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Digg users tend to get pissed off about a lot of things. Any story about Microsoft, for example. Or anything that criticizes Apple. Usually, the ability to bury stories about non-mob-approved topics, combined with the comment area under headlines, is enough of a release valve to settle things down.

But not always - and Digg has a track record of surrendering to the mob when things get really bad.

Based on some of the comments to this story about Digg’s officially-not-happening (but happening nonetheless) acquisition, Digg users are getting all riled up for another fight. Particularly if the buyer ends up being Microsoft.

A sample of the 544 comments left on that story:

• Don’t sell Digg Kevin! Digg this story he needs to know how we feel!
• Why not sell digg when you don’t care about the community. Sell it and we will be happy.
• Somehow i think if Microsoft manages to buy digg a larger revolt than 09 F9 11… will happen, at least i know what i will do
• I would have to see how things went afterward. If Google tried to shoehorn their “style” in to Digg’s interfaces (see: Jotspot), or if Microsoft tried to turn it in to a Windows program, I would switch to Reddit. I like Digg more, but either of those scenarios would kill Digg for me.
  If MS is in, I’m out.
• OK guys, Kevin doesn’t give half a shit about you. He cares about what all americans care about: $500,000,000 in his pocket. Good old capitalism, eh?
  Goodbye Digg… Its been good knowing you… too bad you were gobbled up by corporate america. I remember back in the day when you were a bastion of free speech and unfettered entertainment, but no longer. I guess I will have to revert back to the “best of” section of Craigslist. Don’t sell your soul.
• As long as they lets us delete our accounts
• I am new to digg.com and I really like it. If Microsoft were to buy it that would be it for me. I will remove it from my favorites and never come back.
• Dude. If Microsoft gets its fucking hands on this site then you will definitely have one less viewer. Those fuckers taint everything they touch.
• Is this for real come on Kevin don’t give up to digg to these huge companies. What makes digg so special and fun is that it’s independent this is not a good idea.
• If Microsoft purchases this site, go ahead and make your last act to institute a ‘delete your account’ function.
• This is terrible news. Lets see if we can have yet another viable outlet bought up by huge conglomerates which try to feed us what we are allowed to think and censor our beliefs. I tell you what. If digg is sold, I’m not coming here anymore! Kevin please don’t let this happen. Tell us this is about more than money.

So far, the feedback is mostly pleading, not angry (see this blog post). But as things progress, this could turn nasty, and fast. Mixx, Reddit and other competitors, I’m sure, are looking forward to that happening, and will be more than happy to pick up any stray Digg users who abandon the much-loved/much-hated Digg.

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