The super popular enviro-blog Treehugger has started its own Digg clone called Hugg. Both are systems where users submit and vote on the best stories online each day and the top stories are displayed on the front page. Digg is mostly for tech related news so it’s nice to see Hugg come along for a nontech topic, environmental issues are great for this.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. The top stories are ones with less than 10 “huggs” so far. See, for contrast a Spanish digg clone Meneame, which I wrote about a few months ago on Social Software. There’s another system like this for political news voted on, part of a larger network of shared video and audio, that I can never remember the name of or find in my del.icio.us archive. It’s pretty successful too, though.

Why hasn’t hugg.com gotten more participation yet? It couldn’t be more high-profile than Treehugger makes it. I would really like to better understand what makes a system like this work or not work, as I think it’s a great model. Is it viable outside the super geekosphere though?

My guess on Hugg.com is that the darned thing is just not very easy to use. There needs to be a javascript bookmarklet to submit a story, not a form on the Hugg page that you have to go to and click through 3 times. It looks like they are worried about people submitting too many stories – in reality the problem has been just the opposite.

Hugg has been around for more than a month. My new buddy Gillo from TotalTactics.org is one of the top 10 submitters to Hugg and he’s only submitted 11 links. So this system isn’t working. Why not?

Technorati Tags: treehugger, hugg, digg, diggclones, memetrackers, environmental, net2

Hi there, would some one outside the US please text me XXXXX? I need to make sure my phone will take SMS from outside the US. And make it funny if you can, ok? Thanks.

Update: Ok, so Verizon can only accept text mssgs from 3 countries in Europe and like 15 countries around the world. Not from wherever the wonderful looking service Rasasa.com comes from. Holland is not on the list. As, I presume, one of the largest vendors in the world I would hope they would accept a technology standard that works for everyone everywhere. But they appear not to and deserve to suffer a horrible fate as far as I’m converned. Word – ask about this before you buy a contract for a phone. If there are alternatives, I know I want to be able to get SMS from more countries than this. Bad Verizon.

Today I posted an interview largely about the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal with a neat group called Post Carbon Institute over at Netsquared. Funny thing, same day they released a totally revamped look for their Drupal web site. What an improvement.

Check it out:
Old PostCarbon.org site
Today’s PostCarbon.org site

Doesn’t it look more proffesional, serious and credible? The difference on the most basic level? Rounded corners and darker colors. More than just a trend, rounded corners show that you care. I think it was a great move.

There doesn’t appear to be a direct link to their blog anymore, just posts headlined in a frame at the bottom of the front page. I think that’s a real shame and it’s the second Drupal site by a nonprofit I’ve seen that doesn’t have a direct link to the front page of a blog on the front page of the site. I think that’s bad. But overall, nice new look for a very cool group.

Again, the interview about their work is posted over at NetSquared.

Technorati Tags: nptech, drupal, postcarboninstitute, interviews, blogging

FeedDigest.com is my favorite way to turn RSS feeds into HTML for display on your site. I think it’s the most well supported, most sophisticated and best funded of all the tools for this purpose that I’ve seen. Many other services are just not something you’d want to use in a quality- demanding context. FeedDigest is fantastic. This week Peter Cooper, the man behind the awesome service, announced some new features worth noting.

Improved search/filtering. If you want to syndicate the feeds for say the nptech attention stream, the Net Squared blogs and items tagged “podcast” in del.icio.us all mashed into one newswire and displayed on your blog or website – that’s something you’ve always been able to do with FeedDigest. But if you want only display items that include the phrase “environmental justice” – well now you can do that. Cool.

Export by OPML (feeds bundled in outline form) and clean URLs. These features are just going to make the Feed Digest environment easier to work in.

I love this tool and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
feeddigest, rss, opml, search, feedfiltering

It’s true, Scuttle.org is an open source social bookmarking platform. A variety of different social bookmarking services seem to use it, but none I had ever heard of before looking. http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/ is where you can download the code. Is there an implementation out there where you could, say, both search in and by found in both Scuttle and Del.icio.us at the same time? Wouldn’t that be nice.

Check it out, was just reading an article that humorously referred to God.org so I thought I’d look it up. Then I looked up God.com. Both religious looking enough. Check out God.us though – the U.S. registered URL. It redirects you to Free-Samples.com – where you’ll find lots of coupons and cheap stuff to buy. Does that make sense or what? The internet is so funny.

I’ve used AjaxWrite a number of times now to prepare documents on my Mac for people that I’m guessing are MS Word dependent and it’s great! It’s a project of a group calling itself AjaxLaunch. They aim to launch a new Ajax application every week and have so far succeeded. Their newest is a browser based video editor that seems to be getting good reviews. I’ll be exctied to see what else they come up with.