Dummies guide to Putvote!

If you are already an expert in using social bookmarking sites, then you can have a look at this or this post. Or you can have a look at what Ms. Sparrow has to say on this topic.
Clear about what putvote is? Excellent. Link more articles and put vote ok? Tata!

Those of you who are still here, welcome to the club.

*Flashback Start
I started blogging pretty late in 2004. I was taught two important lies. First, I was asked to pretend that I was writing for myself. And frequently use terms like ‘Its my space, I write what I want’ etc. Lets not get into that. Thats outside the scope of this post. The second lie was to visit random blogs and lie by commenting ‘Hey good post. I can relate to it’ even if the person is talking about a topic completely unrelated to you. Out of curiosity 90 of the 100 bloggers, will come back to the commenters site. But then, is that the only way to find out who all blogs?

*A small deviation
The sequencing of the era is based on when I was introduced to the concept. Not when they were launched. ok?
*End of devaition

Blogrolling era.
Blogrolling was the first tool I used to check out blogs. Everytime someone makes a new post, and pings in the blogrolling site a star will appear next to their name. So every few hours, I used to refresh my site so that the links get updated. The pitfall in this was, in case you are not online for 2 or 3 days then there are chances of you missing some new posts, as the stars disappear after a specified duration. And with the no of blogs increasing, the blogroll link became like a 9 yard saree. So long! And add to it, the mails ‘Hey I linked you, you didnt link me’.

RSS era.
I came to know of this cool concept of RSS feeds. I added the bookmarks of my favorite blogs in Firefox, and started reading the feeds. But again same problem as that of blogrolling. My bookmarks folder became too long, and it was cumbersome to check each and every bookmark for any updates. Later when google reader came up, as always whenever a google product is launched, there was a hungama wherein people screamed ‘Move over bloglines, google reader is here’ Thats when I knew of something called bloglines. It was(and still is) pretty good. You just subscribe to favorite blogs and everytime there is an update, bloglines intimated the user. And unlike blogrolling, the update remains till eternity. Infact, a kid in Rajasthan remembered his previous birth bloglines user id and password and he was able to check all the posts he missed during the turnaround time(Previous birth to current birth). And the kid is worshipped as god, since he knew what he did in his previous birth.

*End of flashback
Ok. The problem of keeping track of blogs is solved, thanks to a variety of tools as mentioned(and not mentioned) above. But now, does anyone read all the posts written by their favorite bloggers? Especially when your blogline feeds say 50 unread items(on an average) every day. To relate it cinematically, I wouldnt miss any movie of Kamalhassan, Rajnikanth or Maniratnam. But same does not hold good for vikram, surya or any newbie. And being a tamilian, I cant watch movies once or twice an year since thats when movies of my favorites release. And I cant afford to take risk of watching movies by reviews that appear in Hindu, Sify etc. Everyone knows how biased it is. Thats where I trust people like Balaji who review almost every single movie without bias. If not for Balaji, I would have missed many a good movies like ‘My wifes murder’ etc.

Now, such a thing was missing in blogs. Desipundit etc was there. But then desipundit consisted of a group of bloggers. And how many blogs can a group of 10 people cover? I would trust a non bloggers review of a post, than a bloggers view. Since there is a high chance of them being unbiased in their reviews. At this time, I do need to mention about Gilli. Gilli is also maintained by bloggers. But they are more unbiased. They like it, they post it. Check their wonderful why gilli page.Super. But again how many blogs can a small group of people cover? Thats when I started looking at digg and del.icio.us etc. But that was purely global. I was looking at a more indianized version.

Enter Putvote. (Clap Clap, plastic whistle. uyyy uyyy. Clap clap).
Thanks to blog worlds all-in-all azhaguraja Kingsley, and blog worlds Vandhiyadevan Ravages for this wonderful platform.
*Here(as in putvote) anyone and everyone can post a link they find interesting. Heck, you dont even need a login. You like it, post the link. In fact even if you dont like a blog post, and spit venom and ridicule the blogger you can post the link. Immediately the post appears in the recent page.
*Once a link is posted, others can vote on the post. If you register and put vote, the post gets 10 votes. If you wish to remain anonymous and put vote, the post gets 3 votes
*So by using some logic on the freshness of the post, and the votes it has received, the post appears on the popular page.

Thats all. So a post becomes popular based on the votes it receives. Can there be a more democratic way? And if the readers dont like the link, no one votes for it and it gets buried in the archives. Even if a person tries to promote his post, the maximum he/she can do is, generate 10 votes. That is all

Advantages of Putvote
1. Easy registration, where you need to enter only 3 things. User id, password and mail address. That is all. And if you wish to remain anonymous, you always can. No questions asked!
2. Democracy. Not only you get to read very good posts, you also get to know the taste of other voters.
3. Comments are open(which are not moderated). You can openly question on what basis a particular post was voted?
4. Wide coverage. You get to know of so many wonderful posts, which you might have otherwise missed.

Concerns
1. As of now, a person can log in and vote. After that, log out and put vote again. So 13 votes for an article, instead of 10.
2. Hope people dont start off ‘I put your article in putvote. Put mine also na’ But there is an advantage here. You can always share an article as a matter of courtesy or whatever. But the article getting more votes is not under your control

So, what are you waiting for? Go put vote, and read the articles posted there

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