Zuggu – Digg Clone for Internet Marketers & Bloggers

Zuggu is a new story submission site that is very much like Digg in that users may submit stories, vote on them, comment on them, and make friends with each other. Today I created an account and had a look around. I did spot a few issues though I’m not sure if they are down to the Zuggu site itself or the Pligg platform on which it is built.

Zuggu’s Specialty Niche

What makes this site very different from the likes of Digg is the niche. When you submit a story you can place it in one of the following categories:

• Make Money Online
• Business
• Entrepreneurship
• Motivation
• Wealth & Money
• Productivity
• Success
• Blogging

So this is Digg for Internet Marketers and Bloggers. There are already a couple of similar sites out there. PlugIM is quite similar to Zuggu and has categories for Business, Development, Marketing, Products & Search Engines. The other one that I know of and use quite a bit is Sphinn which has a strong leaning towards Search Engine Optimization.

To my knowledge, Zuggu is the first one to really cater to bloggers. Sphinn does have a blogging category but it’s buried inside of Social Media which I don’t think really fits. At the moment, Zuggu is brand new and doesn’t have many users but all sites start out like that. Personally I hope it takes off. I’ve created a profile and had a play around with it and these are my findings so far :-

Submitting a Story to Zuggu

I tried it out by submitting one of my favourite posts, 512 ways of making money. When you submit, you enter the URL and the title gets picked up automatically but you have a chance to edit it. You can also enter a description but only the first 150 characters are shown so I had to do some serious pruning to provide a meaningful summary. You pick a category that best fits your submission, enter a trackback URL if desired and you can also enter tags. Here is how my submitted story looked.

Viewing Zuggu Stories

There are several ways of viewing the stories that have been published to Zuggu. On the home page there are tabs for “published news” and “upcoming news” and this was a source of confusion for me. On other story submission sites the published page shows the most popular stories and upcoming section shows the newly submitted stories. In Zuggu, this seems to be the other way around.

After I submitted my story it appeared at the top of the published list which I didn’t expect. What is also odd is that there does not seem to be a way of viewing the stories in order of popularity. There is a link to allow you to sort by recently popular, top today, top in the week, month etc but my new story was shown at the top of the newly popular list with my single vote. This is clearly not quite right.

You can also click on a category heading to filter down the stories to just those in a particular subject area. I put my story in the make money online category and when I clicked on that, again my story was shown at the top. So it appears as if all the story lists are sorted in a chronological order, rather than popularity order.

Zuggu Users

Profile creation is pretty straight forward – you get an option to put in your home page (which is a do-follow backlink by the way, so that’s a good reason to join and check it out!) and you can upload a picture to use for your avatar. There are a few other fields you can fill in but the profile page isn’t too interesting right now. Here’s my Zuggu profile page.

I also noticed a tab called “Top users” and was rather surprised to see myself near the top of the list. This list looks like it is sorted alphabetically! There are stats for each user for the number of stories submitted, voted on, commented on etc plus an interesting looking karma value though everybody is at 10.00 for that. None of these factors appear to affect the ordering of the list. Make a profile that starts with the letter A and you’ll probably be the top Zuggu user!

Read More about Zuggu

I couldn’t find a great deal of information on the web. I think Ariel needs to do a bit of a marketing push if Zuggu is going to take off. She has released a blog though there is not much on it yet and the About page is the standard Wordpress one – oops! Michael Martine has done an interview with Ariel which is pretty interesting.

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