Jason Calacanis blogged about a recent post called Is this the thing that will destroy Digg?, focusing on the open source software called Pligg. With Pligg, you can create your own Digg, and if you’re curious there are several links to Pligg powered sites in the said post as well as on the Pligg forum.

So if anyone can make a Digg clone, will that mean that Digg will die and we all will move onwards to more niche versions of the same thing?

Of course not. Digg is going strong, secures funding and develops in a higher speed than Pligg for that same reason. It also has a huge crowd already, with dedicated niche startups having the same problem that every startup has: attracting the visitors.

Jason says:

Now, the hard truth: digg is never going to go beyond this group on the digg.com domain name. Now, this isn’t a digg to digg, this is just a fact of life and some friendly advice to Jay and Kevin. When you build a huge, passionate community like digg has (and Fark, Slashdot, Engadget, iVillage, and the Well have), you live and die with that group. If digg wants to go big they should start a second digg for women, and one for politics–they shouldn’t do it as part of digg.

In other words, the Digg folks should launch niche Digg-like sites for other areas. They’re living on the techy crowd now which is fine since social bookmarking is strong in this area. What happened when Digg added a sports category? Well, take a look – at the moment there’s a total of three (3) pages of stories, which I would have been embarrassed with if I was responsible for that decision.

Now, does this mean that a Digg on sports won’t work, because Digg couldn’t do it? Of course not, if they launch SportDigg.com and push it in a few select places you’d see a massive list of submitted stories there as well.

As Jason said, it’s better to split the topics up in different sites, keeping the verticals general but focused. Like technology, gaming fits just fine there which is proven by the fact that there are 37 pages of game related submitted stories.

Pligg won’t kill Digg, but Digg might kill Digg if it gets to wide and the core crowd doesn’t feel that it’s a site for them anymore. A couple of niche Digg clones won’t make a difference.