Dot Tactics

Will someone please put scooop out of their misery? This of-the-people-by-the-people mildew has been left to fester long enough, it’s not a party if no one shows up! They are almost as bad as TalkRadioDaily. Man, we need to get those guys some help. Where is the right wing demography? The clever banter? The allusions to Ted Kennedy’s excellent breast stroke? Politics is boring without a little fun mixed in.

I do have to give it up for NewsVine though. Nice job making your application more complex than the Space Shuttle! Its like being caught in a Star Trek turbolift and spending hours trying to figure out which snazzy button opens the blooming door! Oh, it’s the little X in the top right corner. My mistake.

If you are in to lighter fare (Lindsay Lohan Q&A, Britney’s Baby, etc) then there is Staralicious. With its bright blue background and cotton candy taste you have to ask yourself, “Do I feel like throwing up today?” Well, do you? Ahh kick it. Actually, please don’t. Whatever you don’t kick it! It’s like reddit without the intellectual-nazi-my-poo-don’t-stink-I-could-launch-a-starup-if-I-wanted-to mentality.

Listen, people! Please! Just because you can come up with a clever word (like, say, blink, or bump, or, heaven forbid, del.icio.us) don’t feel compelled to launch a service to show your cleverness. I don’t want to be forced to visit reallyslaphappy.com to Slap It! or cleanasacumber.com to Squeegee it! It’s bad enough having to Shout It! all the time. Just ask my coworkers, they really have tough time understanding why I suddenly shout things like “Bears Eat Monkey At Zoo!”

There are lots of niches out there. Xbox fanboys can delay their puberty yet a few more months thanks to xBoxKicks (enough with the kicks already!). Investors can get excellent summaries of mediocre information thanks to the efforts of diggstock (now there is a name that took a lot of thought). And for all you bloggers out there you can..well…blog I guess. If you want you could use blogreporter or wobblog, but then there is always normal behavior too. You know, things like finding a girl, getting married, having kids, taking bathroom breaks, etc.

If all else fails you can always digg. And then digg some more. And then undigg. And then complain about digg. And last but not least, use the handy digg “friends” feature. It is like a well architected handle. It isn’t quite a hammer; it isn’t quite a suitcase; but man how cool it would be if it was attached to something mildly innovative or useful. “Oh look! I can track what digg users are digging! Just like regular digg! Oh rapture!”

Anyway, that is the rounded up the chief pretenders. If you know of any other digg rip-offs please feel free to post them to the comments so that I may sleep peaceably at night knowing that a handful of nobodies are anxiously posting and voting for links to make the world a better place.

Good read about the ongoing trend toward internet based software. The one thought I had was that it is likely that the big kingpin in online “software” really hasn’t shown up yet. Right now the geek community is all abuzz with Digg and Ajax, but ten years ago they were creating pages on geocities that are essentially the same as those currently being created by the public at large on MySpace. As soon as someone creates a couple of apps (beside search) that people will use every day and successfully market those apps to non-geeks I think we will see a dramatic shift to a new player. I don’t know what that might look like (maybe some kind of social life planner with bill pay, calendar, mail tools, notepad, goal management, etc) but if it is simple and slick enough to attract a more general audience then we could have the start windows/office type dynasty.