I recently received an email off Nori Yoshida telling me about a product they were involved in founding, called CrispyNews.
The site allows users to create a community news site for free. The most well-known community news site is Digg, followed by Shoutwire and such. Lots of people call sites like Shoutwire Digg-clone, and to be frank, I am one of those people.
This site allows people to create a site where people can sumbit, vote and comment on stories. The sites are hosted on a subdomain, like http://web20.crispynews.com, which is a site I created. In order to get a subdomain you must apply.
Voting works in a different way than it does on Digg, though. An articles score reduces over a period of time, and anonymous users can vote. However, anonymous votes are only worth 3 points while non-anonymous votes are worth 10. If you register for one site, you can use all the others!
All comments are put in a forum, which in my opinion is fairly good. The advantage of this is it allows centralised discussion.
Maintaining your site has it’s advantages. You can take part in their ad-sharing program, where you get a skyscraper ad on every page (of your choice) and they get a Google AdSense banner. I really like the simplicity of this!
The site has impressive uses of AJAX. When you are voting, the voting is done through really smooth AJAX (I find Digg’s a little jumpy). Another interesting use of AJAX is when you are sumbitting a story, it scans the URL for images and displays them for you to choose one (or if that fails you can specify a URL manually).
There’s a forum for administrators, which is also a bit of a bug-reporting place. This forum is fairly up-to-date - though not extremely frequent.
A couple of features I’d like to see would be the ability to change time zones, as well as the ability to change the scoring schema.
The site is very much turn-key. It is possible to change a theme, but there’s only three themes. You can create a theme, but the documentation makes it look like a complex activity.
You can check out my site, which I plan to maintain, called Web2.0Wire.
Tags: web 2.0, digg, news, web2.0, web tools, web 2, web2, crispynews
This will be kind of lke blogs - see what will happen - everyone will create one there will be a few that will actually do well - the rest will just die down over time or get no visitors at all.Just like blogs.(luckily mine is doing pretty well
Or you could try my free software Pligg (http://www.pligg.com) that has the same idea, but allows you to put your site on your own domain.
[...] While reading up on Webby’s World blog I found an article that frightened me for a brief moment. It was about a fresh new site called CrispyNews that offers a service vaguely like Pligg to beta testers. [...]
Heyyy! Like your design!
XXOO,
JTL
Hmm I’ll have to check out crispy and pligg
My site is http://conservatism.crispynews.com - I’m hoping someone will actually go to it one of these days.
Will drop by your site. Am happy to see your list of advantages for crispynews; it tells me there’s a lot to take advantage of, if I work at it.