Most tech folks have heard of a website called Slashdot where stories are submitted, rated, and discussed by readers. While this site has been around for many years, most agreed that it was an example of awful web design and color combinations and not really laid out very well at all, but it was all we had so we tolerated it.
Well, there are a couple of new players in the game that deserve a look. The first called Memeorandum comes in two flavors: tech.memeorandum and politics memorandum. This site aquires and ranks stories based on how many people are linking to them in the blogs. This is one of the great Scoble’s favorite sites, but I’m not much of a fan.
Following Memeorandum is a site that is really heating things up called Digg which was created by TechTV’s former persona Kevin Rose (who I really couldn’t stand on-air, but at least his code is quite tolerable). This site allows registered users to submit stories to Digg and they are then ranked based on how many submission are received. It has a very clean layout and simple comment system and seems to be what Slashdot should have been for so many years. I usually find that by reading Digg I’ve already read stories days before they appear on Slashdot or Memeorandum.
Update: Just saw an article on Digg that gives the credit for the look and feel to a redesign by SilverOrange.
The last is a small startup that is being funded by LISP proponent Paul Graham’s venture arm Y Combinator which is called Reddit. Reddit is even cleaner than Digg but appears to function on a similar premise. This one really has me captivated. The variety of content available here is amazing. These guys have a blog which is quite interesting (such as reading why they rewrote Reddit changing from LISP to Python, I can only imagine that conversation with Mr. Graham). I geeked out for quite a few hours this past Monday reading through the posts. I highly recommend checking it out. Don’t get scared off if you run across some growing pains (I have seen the site offline a couple of times). Just remember they are new and growing and it is to be expected.
If you know of any other sites like these that you enjoy, please leave a comment and share them.
Update: Scoble just pointed out a slew of similar sites that I was unaware of: Chuquet, Blogniscient, Tailrank, Megite