Digg’s main focus is technology, and I always thought it would be cool to have a tech comm version of Digg with news more relevant to me. One weekend I sat down and created a Digg imitation using software called Pligg. Pligg was pretty much a Digg clone, so I thought it would work out perfectly. I called the site Writer River, referring to the idea of content that continuously flows down a river, all merged into one stream of information that bystanders can observe from a single view, perhaps picking out an object for a while and then sending it back on down the river.

The site was well-received, and it seemed to be taking off, gathering around 50 registered users within the first week. But if I was hoping for a Digg clone, I had a lot to achieve. For starters, whereas the typical number of votes on articles submitted to Digg was around 500+, the number of votes on Writer River was a bit depressing — 3 or 4, sometimes 9 if I voted several times.

The movement of unpublished articles to the front page (through an increasing number of votes) simply wasn’t happening. The site lacked the robust, thriving community of Digg, which made me realize a fundamental truth about Web 2.0 sites: it’s all about the community, not the technology.

I posted less frequently on Writer River and grew more frustrated with the number of spam posts appearing as pseudo articles (for example, posts on hand cream). I’d set Writer River as my home page, and one day while launching my browser I didn’t see the site but rather a message that said, “Your site was hacked by Silahsiz Kuvvetler, the Turkish Hacker.”

To be honest, it was a bit of a relief. I felt I need to regroup and come up with a better implementation of Writer River. By then Twitter was all the rage, and I’d heard good things about Prologue, a Twitter-like WordPress theme in which people could leave brief messages directly from the home page, without logging in to the admin panel. Since I was comfortable with WordPress, I sat down one Friday night and worked on version two of Writer River for about the next day.

In version two, I didn’t want voting. I’d rather just see articles float across the home page. In large communities, where perhaps 100 new articles are submitted a day, you need a voting mechanism to filter the content — but not with my community. The average submission was about two posts a day.

People were excited to see the site back, and while the sink/float voting features of the original version were gone, the second implementation proved a lot more functional. Rather than walking through several wizard-like submission screens, Writer River 2.0 included WordPress’s brand new “bookmarklet,” a script-based bookmark that you drag to your browser’s Links toolbar. When you read an article you like, you click the bookmarklet link, and a small window appears with the link of the article you’re reading. All you do is hit Publish, and it appears on Writer River. It literally takes 3 seconds.

It’s been several months since I launched Writer River 2.0, and so far it’s working well. The bookmarklet made me realize that with technology, what’s convenient gets used. Replace a posting process that takes 30 seconds with one a tenth of the time, and you suddenly find yourself posting a lot more frequently.

This is true of the phenomenon of blogging in general. Blogs make it easy to publish content; as a result, millions of people are blogging daily, publishing new content at historically unprecedented rates of about a million new posts per day.

The nearly infinite sea of information — one million new posts a day — makes sites like Writer River necessary. We need human aggregators, people like Robert Scoble, who’ll sift through hundreds of feeds each day, highlighting the most important content — but in the field of tech comm.

Other community-driven sites are taking off. The latest, Stack Overflow, combines a question-and-answer site with Digg functionality. Users submit questions, others respond with answers, and readers vote on the relevancy of the answers. When people vote positively for your answer, you accrue reputation points that appear below your name.

When hundreds of people engage in content-generation and exchange, impressive results can happen — namely, you find a lot of interesting, accurate content. Writer River doesn’t have nearly enough community to be on par with these sites, but it’s a step in the right direction.

You can visit Writer River at writerriver.com. After registering in the sidebar, add the POST IT link to your browser’s Link toolbar, navigate to an interesting article, and click your browser’s POST IT link.

Spam in comments isn’t nearly as problematic as spam posts, because the posts go out in the RSS feed, which devalues the legitimacy of the feed. A lot of crap floating down Writer River makes the whole river smell.

With the rise of spam, I lost some interest in the social news site. You’d think Pligg would offer better filtering through user registration or confirmation, or allow a site admin to first approve new posts, but no. In fact, Pligg itself is a bit clunky. Creating pages, adding new sections to the sidebar — it’s not very intuitive. The documentation is skimpy and often nonexistent. Worse, it seems there are only one or two half-active developers for Pligg, and a flailing, non-communicative community. There’s no momentum.

So when Silahsiz Kuvvetler (whoever you are) hacked the site through a security vulnerability and brought it down, I almost felt a sigh of relief. Now I had good cause for abandoning Pligg to try something else.

But what? Another Digg clone? Like Mixx.com? I didn’t want an inflexible hosted option. And the whole voting thing — it wasn’t really catching on. I think voting itself is a hassle. All I want to do is skim and read.

I’d heard about a Twitteresque WordPress theme called Prologue, which might provide an alternative. Coincidentally, Prologue was coded by Joseph Scott, a bug exorcist for Automattic who happens to live nearby and who I often talk with at local blogger dinners in Salt Lake.

Unlike other themes, Prologue is intended for groups of people to add updates from the main page through a quick submission form, rather than logging in to the Dashboard to post. Here’s the quick post form I’m referring to.

Post form at the top at the top of Prologue

So I turned from Pligg to WordPress and uploaded the Prologue theme. I also put the new WordPress 2.6 Press It bookmarklet under the title. It turns out, this bookmarklet is nothing short of amazing. You drag it to your browser’s link toolbar, and then when you’re on any Internet page, all you do is click the bookmarklet link — and up pops a little post window to Writer River with the link already inserted.

Press this bookmarklet

So now I point you to Writer River version 2.0, more Twitter-like than Digg-like, powered by WordPress rather than Pligg. More detailed author profiles appear, there shouldn’t be any spam or hackers, and you don’t need to worry about all the voting.

One last note. If you already registered on Pligg, sorry, but you’ll have to re-register for the new Writer River site. They use entirely different databases. But also, when you register this time, you can type a description of yourself, which will appear on your author page.

And if you have a gravatar, you can also pull that in. If you want to repost some of the links you posted before, feel free. But I don’t mind just wiping the slate clean and starting fresh.

On a final note, it feels good to come home to WordPress for this type of site. I know my previous post about WordPress’ documentation came across as harsh, but compared to other open source software, WordPress is miles above in functionality and documentation. And most importantly, the WordPress community is vibrant. That same vibrant community is what I hope Writer River will one day attract.