WTF: “Where’s the Fire” - Digg clone or WTF?

I haven’t written an interesting blog post for a while, but hopefully some people will find this interesting. It seems that the leading blog search engine Technorati has launched a new feature which more or less directly challenges the oh-so-popular Digg. There does seem to be some fundamental differences however, which I will look in to.

The choice of name for their new feature is certainly interesting, to say the least. They seem to try and brand it as “WTF”, which doesn’t stand for what you’ll obviously think, but rather “Where’s the Fire“. Now I don’t know what clever guys they’ve hired at the Technorati offices, but I sure hope they’re not being paid a lot at all, because that idea behind the name is so stupid it instantly makes me think “WTF?” - Or wait, maybe that’s the genius of it?

Regardless, moving on to the next points. Just like Digg, Where’s the Fire lets people submit stories and news, or “blurbs” as they call it over there, that they find interesting, and then other people can vote for it if they find it interesting as well. Not a new concept by any means, but Where’s the Fire gives it an interesting twist. Instead of just being a place for people to submit links to articles they’ve found, they rather encourage people to write their own stories. By using other hot stories, they are supposed to write their own thoughts on the hot topics and just include links to the sources.

This also omits the need for a comments system such as the one at for instance Digg, because the stories, or blurbs themselves are comments on already existing stories, that can be voted up or down. The idea itself is definately interesting, and with the popularity of Technorati it should become a very good opportunity for sensible people to get their voices to stand out from the nonsense buzzing of the crowd that seems to dictate the comments at similar sites. It is also a nice alternative to Digg where the general conscience seems to be that bloggers don’t write interesting stories.

The “danger” of course, is the same as in every community where democracy is a pillar, which is abuse of the system. People can group together and form their own circles where they vote eachother stories up for personal gain, but this is nothing new and is faced by all similar sites, and hopefully they have already taken appropriate measures to guard themselves against this at Technorati already.

All in all I am excited by the prospect of what WTF (Where’s the Fire) can bring to the table, and hopefully it will be a nice opportunity for bloggers that aren’t widely recognized to gain some well-deserved exposure!

Edit: If you like this story, you can WTF-it here! I like that, WTF-it =)