Interesting Discovery: PPLjuice Asks if You Are Worth Writing About

I have just noticed an unfamiliar domain in the referral traffic stats for Profy and since I know this is how bloggers often discover new startups I could not resist clicking the link and checking it out. Since the site is perfectly open for anyone to browse and even register freely I thought it would not hurt the creators (no idea who they are without any information on the about page or any mentions of the service anywhere) if I write about it here: after all, if you are not ready, you protect your site with passwords, right?

So the discovery is named PPLjuice where “PPL” obviously stands for “people”. This is actually a simple Pligg-powered social voting website where users are supposed to vote for people and determine who is the most popular. Right now the site looks like the default Pligg installation has only received minor changes so it is obvious that the site is in the works still. But since everything seems to work as it is supposed to be, it is already possible to add some content to the currently not very lively site.

I am sure everyone here knows perfectly well how Pligg works so I don’t think it is worth discussing how stories are submitted and voted up and down here. The only major distinction is that on PPLjuice users are supposed to talk about people only and determine how important (worth the buzz) they are. And I can already imagine the site will be full of internet personalities pretty fast if anyone bothers noticing the site’s existence.

It may be a good idea to have a site to vote for people only since we already seem to have a Digg analogue for quite a number of different niches. Besides, it may be interesting as a tool to make some decisions like which employer to choose or who of your two colleagues to date: simply submit both options to PPLjuice and see who gets more juice from users.

But what I find a little offending is the catchphrase they chose for the site: “Are You Worth Writing About?” I am quite sure that absolutely any person on Earth is worth writing about because each and every one of us has some story to tell and some unique experience to share. But letting the crowd decide how “writeworthy” I am may very well turn everything into a painful experience heavily damaging self-esteem.

And while I was not disappointed after I have not found any single mention of my name (and that makes it even more of a mystery since I have no idea how people could arrive to Profy from this site without mentions of either me, any of our ex-bloggers or Profy itself) because blogging really makes people more thick-skinned than I could ever imagine, I believe other people may be slightly (or severely) offended when they find that they are not “worth writing about”. So maybe we should give the site a few hours of glory and start submitting our friends in there for these friends to be able to find their names once they decide to check it out?