Your opinions about a new site idea

[jkon]

I am not sure if this is the right daniweb forum to ask your opinions about a new site idea. If not ,I am sorry and please remove it. Now, to the site idea. I am aware that there are many social bookmarking sites, I am not custom with a lot of them and maybe this idea have also been developed , if so please share it with me.

We all know directories, for each link there is a title , a short description and of course the URL of it, these links are in categories – subcategories. What if each user of the site could create his own directory to a subdomain of the site with the username at front. The main idea is not create a full directory for each user with separate submission process but to share his links in an organized way with a title and a short description. Maybe if this makes sense to have the option for a user to allow certain other users to suggest links to it.

I have several thoughts to that idea. One of it is that I should have an administrative system so I could check links after being added and remove those who aren’t “family friendly”, maybe if a user add to many of those delete his dir (of course after notices and by making all these very clear in the registration terms acceptance), what is your view on that ? . Also because there would be a small description of each link , maybe some sites that are linking would request to delete those links (should that happened at once or should I ask for proves that the person request the deletion has something to do with that site ?)

I would really like to hear opinions about that idea. If there is already out there, if it is a bad idea, if it could be better with some changes, or anything. Thank in advance.

[mike_2000_17]

This sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure if there is something similar already.

Just a thought. This sounds very similar to YouTube's "suggestions" column, but for website links (URLs) instead of videos. What I mean is that this list of suggested "related" videos is most likely created from a combination of factors including a preference for other videos from the same user account, a basic "google-search" result from the video title, and probably traffic statistics (e.g., what other video many users tend to click on after watching the current video, and things like that). I see no reason why one couldn't create the same kind of system for the web as a whole, and it is very possible that google already does something similar under-the-hood of their search engine (because traffic statistics definitely come into play). But, as far as I am aware, there is no system like a side-bar or otherwise that lists suggestions of other links you might want to visit given the page you are currently on.

I think you are suggesting to also include more user control on the link associations. I can easily see the purpose of that. For example, as a user of that service, let's say I'm interested in Klingon linguistics, I could create a folder for that subject in my user account and list a few interesting links related to that topic. Then, an another Klingon enthusiast comes along, searches for that topic on the site and finds my folder with my links, then he can "subscribe" to my folder and suggest links of his own to add to it. At the end, you collectively build up a kind of database of directories for various subjects, which serves both as a go-to place to find relevant sites for a given subject (similar to browser "favorites" or "bookmarks" but collective), and as a sharing point sort of like a news feed where you can see new links that have appeared in the folders you subscribed to. I think that's a great idea. And if there is such a site already out-there, I'd like to know, cause I would definitely use it.

Of course, such a site would require a lot of moderation and spam-prevention, this is a big issue for any such site. I think that a combination of traffic statistics and a kind of "like/dislike" system such as youtube is very effective at that. If you use such inputs to prune away links that are either very unpopular or have too many "dislikes", then that would take care of a large part of your moderation and spam-prevention.

One of it is that I should have an administrative system so I could check links after being added and remove those who aren’t “family friendly”, maybe if a user add to many of those delete his dir (of course after notices and by making all these very clear in the registration terms acceptance), what is your view on that ?

Certainly, you need administration of the site, that goes without saying, but be careful with censorship. There are many subjects that people are interested in that aren't "family friendly" (whatever that actually means in practice). A site like youtube doesn't allow very gross videos (like those two girls with that cup) or porn videos, but they are often threading a thin line which makes moderation difficult (requires hard judgement calls, and gathers complaints and boycotts if too excessive). A site with no censorship is much easier to deal with, but for something like youtube they must have censorship because otherwise it would be flooded with porn videos. And sites with too much censorship generally don't do very well on the internet because they are costly to operate, put a lot of hurdles towards posting stuff on them, and generally goes against what people like to go to the internet for: free and open exchanges and sharing of ideas. But for a directory site like you are proposing, I don't see that censorship is really necessary beyond a rule like "do not suggest links that are unrelated to the subject" which would keep "family unfriendly" links under "family unfriendly" subjects, which is really all you need to prevent a kid who is looking for pictures from Disney land to fall on a site selling BDSM attire. My point is that if you want your site to catch on, you have to be inclusive and understand that some groups of people might want to be sharing links about a subject like BDSM attire (which, I guess, could be marked as 18+ or something).

[Dani]

Isn't this just like the old-style Digg?

[jkon]

Thank you for your responses so far.

mike_2000_17 I will read yours many times since there are many interesting ideas on it and some of these can easily implemented in the original one. There is one that despite the fact that I found it really appealing and inside the concept I couldn’t have the means to launch it , (“there is no system like a side-bar or otherwise that lists suggestions of other links you might want to visit given the page you are currently on.”) one step at the time , but really thank you for sharing that.

To be honest Dani I didn’t had any user experience in the past with Digg. Searching this idea I created an account there and I couldn’t find how to add categories / subcategories under my account and add links to them (with title , url , short description) , and of course all of that to be public for everyone how visit my account there. If you know such option in Digg or somewhere else please tell me so. It is a like allowing users to create their own directories under a subdomain of the site with their username, without the classical submission process (they could add a link , and only other users that they approve can suggest links to them).

Except the fact that I haven’t a clue if there is a vital space for such site / service , I am not sure if there is any legal issues. If you allow users to add their own title and short descriptions in the sites that they list in their “directory” then some sites listed there might not be happy about that.

And of course there is always the matter of the “super” administration of the site, some robots applications might help spotting links added that might have a problem but of course would need many working hours of a human (or humans), with a clean (-difficult) approach deciding what should be deleted (mike_2000_17 thank you also for your approach to that).

[mike_2000_17]

Isn't this just like the old-style Digg?

Digg, AFAIK, just aggregates news feeds and keeps scores. At least, I don't know that it does anything else, if it does, it hides it pretty well.

@jkon:
There seems to be a term for this kind of site, Social Bookmarking. It seems most sites for this are pretty aweful, or have disolved into sites exactly like Digg or more general website ranking/commenting sites.

Now that I think about it, the closest thing is probably Wikipedia. If you want to research a topic, you go to the wiki page for it, read through the info, and then start digging through the interesting links (citations) at the bottom. Of course, you could make a site that is less of an encyclopedia and more of a link collection per topic.

[Dani]

Digg isn't designed to be a news aggregator: It's designed to be a social bookmarking site where users submit interesting articles. Their entire rating system is based on the reputation of the user who submits the article in the first place.

For a programming-related site, check out Dzone.com if you're not already familiar with them. They are social bookmarking for programmers.

[mike_2000_17]

Digg isn't designed to be a news aggregator: It's designed to be a social bookmarking site where users submit interesting articles. Their entire rating system is based on the reputation of the user who submits the article in the first place.
For a programming-related site, check out Dzone.com if you're not already familiar with them. They are social bookmarking for programmers.

Sure. I guess they are not technically-speaking news aggregators, but the point is that they mostly feature a stream of user-submitted "heads-up" about certain interesting articles. And given the needing-to-attract-traffic nature of these sites, they need a constant feed of fresh articles, and thus, mostly end up featuring lists of news articles. The sites are reasonably good at doing what they do, and that's fine.

From my understanding of the OP's description, this is not at all what he means with his website idea. It sounds more like a site to gather and organize references (links) for given subjects and sub-subjects. With a system to search and browse subjects (as opposed to using keywords in a search engine), to contribute to and watch certain subject directories, and so on. As far as I can see, sites like Dzone, Digg, Diigo, Delicious, etc. do not do this.

[pritaeas]

It sounds more like a site to gather and organize references (links) for given subjects and sub-subjects.

Isn't that just a link farm, like DMOZ ? Been thinking about building such a site for a while now, but due to lack of time, it's stopped with the idea. Link directory scripts are easy to come by, but I was looking for something newer.