Autopligg

[tagawa]

I'm on a suggestions roll...
Here's something I've been thinking of for a while, especially since I saw http://180n.com. If you haven't seen it, take a look. It's basically a site where people can vote on news stories they are interested in, but the news is provided automatically by RSS feeds from Yahoo, etc.

I personally prefer the Digg/Pligg style of humans submitting and commenting on stories, but a big problem with getting sites like these off the ground is that you get few visitors if you don't have a lot of stories/votes, and you get few stories/votes if you don't have a lot of visitors. So my solution would be to import RSS feeds for each category from the start so you immediately have content to attract visitors. You could eventually get rid of the automation once you have enough members submitting stories. My view of the process is as follows:

// In a config file, input keywords for each category that are likely to return lots of relevant results.

// Set up a poor man's cron job to pull in a (e.g.) Yahoo search RSS feed (using the keywords) for each category. I.e. With every view of the top page, check if the script has been run in the past hour. If not, then run it.

// Parse and insert the stories into each category's section setting Yahoo as the submitter.

// When the story is viewed, Yahoo's (or whoever's) logo must be displayed and the submitter's link must be changed to point directly to Yahoo. You could also add a note to clarify that this story is an automated submission. Incidencally you'd have to join Yahoo's developer club thing to get an API key.

There could be some gaping holes in this plan so if you have any criticisms/improvements or alternative ideas, please let us know.

[thetrc]

i would to set something like that up on my pligg

[Qwest]

me too....

[Yankidank]

I agree that it's tough starting a site and getting users to submit stories regularly, but I think this idea would completely destroy lots of what Pligg is based on. If you set it to just automatically insert stories you're pretty much making a http://freshnews.org/ site that really takes away from the site's human involvement. What makes a Pligg site so great is that each article has an attachment to someone out there who promotes it thinking that others might enjoy it. I really don't think it's a great idea to set your site on autopilot and just import news stories, but I know how frustrating it can be to get users to visit an empty site so I can understand the want for such a thing.

[cryptkeeper]

suggestion: sit down for 2 hours and work on your site by hand. works well dosent it? I'm getting a few pwoplw to submit some stories and paying them 20$ for an hour or so's worth of work. 100$ should get me 500 articles. well worth it? no?