TWO NEW ONLINE VENTURES, BOTH modeled on collaborative tech news site Digg.com, launched this week. One of the sites, Dealspl.us, allows users to submit online deals on electronics, housewares, clothing, and other products, and then vote on the best values or products; the other, Sperocite.com, focuses on news stories about religion. The new initiatives come about one month after AOL re-launched Netscape as a collaborative news site.
But, while collaborative sites are sprouting online, it remains to be seen whether they will draw much traffic. For instance, most of the stories at Sperocite, which went live last weekend, were submitted by the user “Spero News.” Few have more than one vote attached to them.
Netscape.com, which drew more than 9 million visitors in the month leading up to its launch, appears to be struggling to attract loyal participants. Netscape’s general manager, Jason Calacanis, recently resorted to offering to pay the top users of Digg and other collaborative news sites $1,000 a month to move to Netscape. (Techcrunch – Digg profiles up for sale at eBay)
