VentureBeat

The web offers more than a few sites with variations on the Digg theme, but Spotplex, which has designed a potentially more democratic ranking system, is different.

Instead of the submit-and-vote system used by Digg and its clones, Spotplex ranks articles based on the number of impressions they get. Bloggers insert a line of code into their blogs, and Spotplex works in the background, tallying each time someone lands on an article’s page.

Spotplex, of Santa Clara, Calif., officially launches tomorrow.

The results of these tallies show up in real time on Spotplex’s page, which is mostly just like Digg’s. You can see the total number of times an article has been read, browse by categories like technology, politics, and entertainment, and change the time-frame of rankings from the last 24 hours to the last hour, month, and all time. In a useful touch, you can toggle between “relative” and “absolute” popularity. “Relative” popularity weights views against a blog’s overall traffic, so sites that don’t have a massive readership but have an unusually popular article have a chance to show up on the front page.

Spotplex’s chief executive Doyon Kim argues his company’s method is a more legitimate way to determine the popularity of a post. Spotplex is not overrun by the the tech-savvy elite that dominate Digg. In theory, he may be right.

Spotplex requires no active user behavior, like Digging or tagging, and readers don’t have to sign up for anything. It cannot be gamed in the same way that Digg can, and is immune to the user rebellions that have been an occasional headache for the massively popular aggregator.

That is not to say that Spotplex cannot be gamed. Digg, while facing corruption at the hands of services like Subvert and Profit (see TechCrunch coverage here) at least requires humans to submit and vote on articles. Spotplex’s automated system could be more vulnerable to cleverly designed bots. Further, because it only measures impressions on individual article’s pages, it misses traffic from people who read blog entries through a feed reader or simply on the blog’s main page.

But the more significant problem is that unless it succeeds at gaining mass adoption, Spotplex will not be relevant. With Digg, despite its heavily-skewed male techie demographic, blogs from anywhere on the web at least have a chance to gain recognition. With Spotplex, if you haven’t signed up your blog, you’re off the grid.

Spotplex hopes to entice bloggers by offering a widget that will list a blog’s most popular posts in the sidebar — possibly driving more pageviews — but it has a very long way to go. Moreover, once the concept is out there, there’s nothing stopping widespread and entrenched widgets like MyBlogLog from throwing together some code and producing a similar offering. To succeed, it will need to stay one step ahead of hackers, gain momentum and start driving noticeable traffic to participating blogs.

Meanwhile, Digg has reportedly blazed by the 20 million unique visitors mark (the figure is disputed) .

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Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.