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?

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