ShowHype: 500,000 clicks in April
There’s no question that blogs have changed the internet landscape. Technorati claims there are over 112 million blogs, growing at an astonishing rate of 175,000 new blogs every day, covering every topic imaginable.
RSS feed readers are helpful in keeping up on your favorite blogs, but sometimes it’s nice to have a filter, such as Digg. As much as I enjoy Digg, the community is not necessarily warm to blogs about indie music. I’ve searched for alternatives to Digg, and even considered starting my own by using the Pligg engine, but decided against it.
There’s a new social community similar to Digg, called ShowHype, that is focused on entertainment news: movies, television, music, and celebrities. Launched several months ago by the same people that brought BallHype, ShowHype claims over 500,000 clicks in April. Content from 1,200 entertainment blogs make up most of the stories, and though the links are automatically added via RSS feeds, ShowHype members must vote for a story before it moves up the que.
ShowHype ranks blogs and individual stories, making it a great resource for information; Puddlegum ranks #113. “Blog rankings are based on the number of links blogs receive from other tracked blogs, with the most weight given to recent links and links from other high-ranking blogs.”
A criticism of ShowHype is that most of the popular stories are predictably about Brittany Spears or Kanye West. But this is due to being a new community and a lack of imagination from . This could quickly change though if a hundred fans of independent music began to push content from indie music blogs.