Here is another Digg-alike social bookmarking service that’s currently hitting the Web. And, no, according to them Thoof aspires to be nothing like Digg, stating that ‘Thoof prevents the “angry mob” from determining relevance and controlling the distribution of news. Thoof tries to serve the individual interests of each user, rather than assuming that everyone is interested in the same topics. Thoof also allows users to improve the quality and accuracy of news items, much like Wikipedia.‘ What? A WikiDigg?

I’m fascinated with Thoof simply because it’s been creating a lot of buzz since it went out of beta around July of this year, and they’ve been moving in strides since then. Thoofers can have their blog posts thoofed using a new feature called the ThoofRank Badge. When submitted, Thoof will learn from your clicking habits on news and information that you frequently read or check out. Once it learns your reading habit, or rather, Thoofing habits, it then shows you other relevant information that it thinks you will be interested in, similar to personalized news.

I’ve browsed through the comments left by some of the users about the extra steps they had to take to include a ThoofRank button in their site, but overall Thoofers are currently liking this widget a lot. The widget looks like a small meter button that shows how popular — or Thoof — your post is in the Thoofosphere.

Man, I love thoofing about Thoof! I think this is going to be big in just a while longer. What do you think?

No related posts.

John Chow has recently accepted a challenge to create a new nobody blog and transform it into a somebody blog without revealing his identity, which for some reason I find reminiscent of Robert G. Allen’s money-making challenge, but without the mentoring bit. John is giving us the chance to define the amount of income that new blog should achieve to become a somebody blog. It will be pretty interesting to read his techniques and how this goes, although I reckon the usual suspects apply: AdWords / AdSense and other popular blog ads, product reviews, social bookmarkings, and niche content.

I added in the comment that USD3,000 in 3 months should suffice to declare it a somebody blog. However, I also have to agree that the expenses that come with the work done to generate the income is as important, as what Andy Beard mentioned in Darren Rowse a.k.a. Problogger’s post concerning John Chow’s monthly earnings. I wouldn’t be surprised if his net earnings are just a third of what he makes. Even though everyone knows just how little you actually need to spend on AdWords, John would need to account for his monthly hosting fees, and to be more calculative, the utilities and time-cost used to build up his blog presence.

I may or may not diligently follow his progress because generally I’m not such a big fan of John Chow dot com and its community. In any case, my interest will be to see which social bookmark sites he’ll be using most for his link exchanges, with Digg being the top no doubt.

Related posts:

1. A personal discourse on blogging

Over the week, I’ve been pondering the fate that is WebGrrrl.net. To be honest, even with the seemingly lack of updates (seemingly, because I’m ignoring my paid posts), I actually have a lot of things in my mind I’d like to blog about. However, the topics I wanted to blog on doesn’t really fit into what I initially envisioned WebGrrrl.net to be, which was… umm, I wasn’t really sure what it was. I never really had a vision for WebGrrrl.net, but I know I wasn’t going to post on anything too personal, or too commercial, or short posts on what I found through my daily bloghoppings.

At first, I thought of refocusing the objective of WebGrrrl.net to topics concerning blogging and WordPress development; I would then create a new blog focusing on interesting doodads I found on the Web, and another blog on Web programming matters. Nah. I finally decided on creating just one more blog for my Web programming stuff called Coding Idiot, which will be launched next week. I may want to look for volunteers to contribute a post every fortnight, with some link love as exchange. Once things are really rolling, I plan to start paying bloggers who contribute to Coding Idiot. I’ll write up some more details in the new blog pretty soon.

As for my doodads idea, I may just dump them back here, because I’m sure others will find them fun as well.

So there. Cheers!

Related posts:

1. WebGrrrl.net now an URL shortener with YOURLS
2. @webgrrrl’s got new feature: Twitter Lists

Don’t get me wrong, Geekhosting.com has very responsive tech support, but I’m sick and tired of these once-a-week unscheduled outages, ranging from 10 minutes to half a day at a time (I’m suspecting that it’s out of their control since they are just hosting resellers). So I’m switching to my own tried-and-true fantastic web hosting service which I idiotically should have done months ago, and did only with my other money-making domains. Now that I’m seriously making money out of WebGrrrl.net with my sponsored posts, and since my 7-year-old IT company, Cybernet, has been hitting the roof with several huge projects, I just can’t afford to have my sites down.

Expect more downtimes this next week as I migrate my stuff to my new hosting. Personally, I’ll be expecting more and more sleepless nights working everything off, while helping my hubby start off his own domain and blog — dang, I was really looking forward to some free time to debug the Top Commentators Widget, it’s so long overdue!

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1. @webgrrrl’s got new feature: Twitter Lists
2. Reminiscing the growth of WebGrrrl.net, and how would you describe your blog?