digg - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Since the world cottoned on to the fact that search engine optimisation was all about linkbuilding, the world's greatest online marketers have been trying to develop Google-friendly, scalable, linkbuilding solutions.

The perceived value of the most popular Web 2.0 startups lies in their large 'communities' and the content that those large communities contribute.

Without their communities, services such as Facebook and Digg would be of little value to advertisers, investors and potential acquirers.

Most people have heard of Digg , the largest social news website in the world, but a lot of webmasters are not sure how it works and how they can become part of the Digg community.

Digg has introduced a range of new features to its social news site, allowing users to flesh out their profiles and connect to friends on the site, a la Facebook or MySpace.

As on Facebook, Digg users can now add information about themselves to their profile pages, as well as uploading photos. Users can share profiles with friends or others, depending on privacy settings.

AOL has launched 'Propeller', a new social news site, only a few days after moving Digg-rival Netscape to a more traditional model.

Netscape is now being refashoned as a ‘traditional’ news service - a move AOL said would allow it to fit in better with perceptions of the historic Netscape brand.

Hmmm, doesn't sound quite right, does it? AOL must have had an inkling about this sort of thing 15 months ago, when it was preparing to relaunch Netscape as - give or take - a Digg clone.

Microsoft and Digg have announced a partnership in which Microsoft will serve up display and contextual advertising to the social news site's 17m monthly users.

The three-year exclusive deal will boost Microsoft's efforts to compete with arch-rival Google, which it is replacing as Digg's online ad partner. 

Richard at Read/WriteWeb reckons Digg needs editors, and judging on the quality of some of the submissions we can see that he has a point. But Digg prides itself on being entirely user-generated and automated, so we have a conundrum here.

Should Digg change its business strategy by allowing pesky humans to moderate, tweak and ‘improve’ submissions by other, less-grammatically sound humans?

Or, should it rely on automation and better functionality to help reduce these issues?

Spotplex is a recently launched news aggregator that offers an alternative to the Digg model where users submit and vote on stories. Instead, articles are ranked by the number of pageviews they receive.

Users of news aggregator Digg have been flooding the site with articles about a single issue - an encryption key that can be used to get around the DRM on High Definition DVDs.

After users began posting the code on the site, Digg received a cease and desist notice and blocked the stories, but that only prompted the site's users to start flooding it with articles about the code.