Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

A new digg-like 'social bookmarking website' is aiming to be a fairer way of ranking submitted stories, and reducing the ability of some 'power users' to game the system.

Thoof offers personalised news, pictures, and videos like other similar websites, but is hoping to appeal to a wider community including smaller bloggers.

To get a story ranked highly on the big sites like digg, stories need a lot of votes very soon after they're submitted. That swings things in favour of the major bloggers, and those working in networks to help promote each other's sites.

Thoof claims to be a next generation social bookmarking site. It 'learns' the interests of each reader, tailoring the stories it displays to the tastes and viewing history of each user. Subject tags are also used, helping group and link to other stories on similar topics.

Stories on Thoof are all submitted by users, who can add a special 'ThoofRank badge' to the bottom of their post. The badge measures how interesting each story is to reader with similar interests. It also means even niche subject stories can achieve a high rank, because they're not compared against only the biggest stories.

I joined the site this morning, and submitted a couple of recent stories from this blog. The sign-up process was quick and painless, and the 'ThroofRank badge' was easy to embed in my blog posts. I also found a number of other interesting stories on "my" front page, on topics that appealed to me.