Scoop This Goes Where Many Have Gone Before

Scoop This is a site that is trying (and failing) to be the "next Digg". A user submitted news site, complete with user profiles, article ratings and tags? Yawn. We've definitely seen this one before, and better.

Taking the concept of "meta" to the extreme, this site has managed to cobble itself together using every possible Web 2.0 cliche. Blue, green and orange? Check. Obnoxiously large, rounded buttons? Check. User generated links with "newsy" titles? Check. User profiles? Check. Ugly tag cloud? Check. Favicons linking to other submittal sites? Check. Unattractive widget buttons for user blogs and sites? Check. 

With each tick down the list of Web 2.0 cliche, Scoop This dug itself a deeper hole. I kept trying to find the one thing that Scoop This does differently to set it self apart. I kept hoping to find one thing that would mean it was more than just another run of the mill Digg, Reddit or other existing site clone trying to make some money on someone else's good idea.

Then I noticed it. The ultimate in copycat irony: under each user submitted story is a line of favicons linking to other submittal sites. The second one of these is a link to Digg itself. The copycat using the originator to get traffic and expecting no one to notice - priceless.

Scoop This even goes as far as using the term "Bury" for killing a story. With this much mining from the Digg vault, I'm surprised they even bothered to change the toggle button from "Digg" to "Vote" for each link. Really, they took so much else from Digg, why bother stopping with a single word? They may as well have carried their painful lack of originality to the nth degree - at least then we could have gotten a laugh at their expense.