A look at two “digg” style Indian sites

Recently I came across two delightfully named “digg” style Indian sites – DealMaadi and TechPakoda. Lets have a look at them.

DealMaadi:

DealMaadi helps shoppers to find the best deals across various cities in India. Registration is free and you can post deals and vote on the best deals once you become a member. The category list is exhaustive, including cameras, laptops, jewelry, software, travel etc. The site is very easy to understand and navigate. Looks like they check every deal submitted, as there is a “unpublished” tab and the FAQ says

“We check every posted deal to avoid such situations. Since to err is human, please flag us here and we will act to ensure only the clean and genuine deals are part of the system.”

which is good to know and explains why I didn’t see any spam on the site (frankly, I expected to see some). Though the idea itself is not original, it is smart of Rajiv Renganathan (who created the site) to apply it to a very niche and useful topic – shopping. We all like to save some cash while shopping, so the site should see some good traffic.

And yes, the site has the regular features – RSS feeds (for popular, new and all deals), tag clouds etc. I couldn’t see any ads at the site, but I assume that would be the way to monetize it in future.

Some suggestions:

1. How about adding “Expiry date” when submitting deals? (obviously they won’t show up on the site after they expire)

2. City specific RSS feeds, at least for the metros?

Its a very useful site. Have a look, and happy shopping

TechPakoda:

Thats an interesting name

TechPakoda is for Indian techies, aggregating news primarily on the tech scene in India. There is nothing new to say about how the site works, it is similar to Digg and DealMaadi. While browsing through the first few pages of the popular stories section, most (not all) of the stories submitted were relevant. Thats good because the site depends on its users to flag irrelevant content.

Most of the links in the “Most Voted” page were good reads and I spent a good deal of time going through them. You can put JavaScript code in your blog (or site) and allow your users to directly submit links to TP. I couldn’t figure out the difference between “Latest News” and “Upcoming News”. There are huge banner ads and also Adsense, so their monetization strategy is clear.

Digg style sites for niche topics is a good idea, as they are more relevant than a site trying to cater to all subjects. Reminds me of that excellent site DZone.