Joshua Schachter, an electrical and computer engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, is the mastermind behind the widely popular personal bookmarking sight: Del.icio.us or just delicious.com. 

Schachter wasn’t an over night success.  His first online entrepreneurial endeavor was Memepool, a simple collection of interesting links Schachter found while browsing the web.  He received numerous e-mails suggesting other links, and after he had over 20,000 links, he wrote another program, Muxway.  Muxway allowed Schachter to give each link a “tab” so he could sort his links and group similar sites together with ease. 

He rewrote the code for Muxway and in 2003, Schachter opened up his bookmarking concept to other users and created Del.icio.us.  After two years, Schachter quit his job in March 2005 to work full time on his growing project.  A month later in April, he received $2 of funding to flesh out the Delicious concept.  People loved the idea of being able to access links they previously stored in the “Favorites” folder from any computer with an internet connection.  Schachter’s hard work paid off and in December 2005, he sold Delicious to Yahoo! for between $15 – $30Million.  A selling price in the millions? That’s pretty delicious.

It’s  the 21st Century and you’d be caught off guard if you heard someone say, “Dude – that’s sweet!  I totally dig that!”, but many internet users have been “digging” interesting things on the internet since 2004.  Digg is essentially a site where users can vote up (digg) or vote down (burry) stories they find on the internet.  Submitted stories can range from humorous posters to serious economic comentaries to freaky health issues.   

Digg’s approach is unlike a typical link database in the since that it is uses the democratic system.  The more popular a site is, the more diggs it will get and the higher it will rank in the database until the most popular sites appear on Digg’s homepage. 

So why does Digg attract nearly 236 million visitors every year? 

• Relevant, up-to-date information
• Similar to Stumble Upon, but bad sites are weeded out by others
• Useful for finding new websites and blogs
• Constantly changing content

Though a very succinct list, it addreses most of the issues why users come back to Digg day after day.  Why do you dig Digg?

We live in a world where consumer demand is changing constantly.  Companies are always looking for ways to predict where future demand will be, but it is difficult to guess what is going to be in highest demand in the future.  Mixx, Digg, and Delicious may not be able to predict the future, but they are assessing current demand in a very powerful way.

Mixx, Digg, and Delicious all use popularity in some way to suggest to users content that they might be interested in.   When a user checks out the content they can agree or disagree, which will affect others view of the content. 

These sites have harnessed technology to essentially get up-to-the-second reports on the popularity/demand for a product.  They are able to quantify market signals and determine the demand for these sites at this very moment.

If a business can’t predict the future demand, perhaps the next best thing is up-to-date measurements of demand.  Companies should study Digg, Mixx, and Delicious to see just how they measure demand and break it into different market segments, and then apply it to their companies in order to be able to better assess market demand.

In our countries current economic situation many people are left without the “traditional job”, where you go to the office from 8 – 5. However, this doesn’t mean you still can’t make money from the comfort of your home. There are multiple ways to make money online such as,

1. Set up a blog or website for profit
2. Start an online business
3. Find a virtual job
4. Online retail trade
5. Create your own product and sell it
6. Affiliate Marketing

I think that the best way to make money online is to blog effectively. b5media Inc. is a global new media network featuring a wide variety of topics ranging from entertainment and lifestyles to sports and technology. One of the largest blog networks in the world, b5media reaches nearly 10 million unique visitors and receives 30 million page views per month. So how do you make money using this site? You receive a flat rate of $25 dollars a month to start. Then, depending on traffic received you start earning a percentage on the number of visits. There are also bonuses you can receive if your blog gets certain amount of attention for example,

1. Major social media sites front page (Mixx/Digg/Lipstick/StumbleUpon/etc) or coverage by leading industry blog: up to $50
2. Exclusive interviews: up to $50
3. Press coverage: up to $50
4. % increase in comments: up to $50
5. % increase in traffic: up to $50

Here is a chart that shows the possibility of earning money while blogging.

So if your passion or talent is blogging and you want to make a few extra dollars a month, why not try out making money online.

As Digg has grownin popularity so has general awareness of the “Digg effect”. For those of you who were like me and do not know anything about the Digg effect let me explain. Digg effect is “the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.”

The Digg effect occurs when a smaller site makes it to the front page of Digg. The resulting mass increase in traffic overloads the host server and takes all the bandwidth. Sites can be down from anywhere around a few hours up to a couple of days.

Let’s evaluate, however, the pros and cons of being Dugg by Digg. Aside from the obvious risk of the “Digg Effect” in being worse off than before being Dugg, it is interesting to note that the common users of Digg generally do nto click on ads. The users of Digg are not concerned with so much as finding a sweet new site, but rather finding quick and valuable web tools and information. Second, Digg users generally do not return to the webpage, but rather simply move on to the next big Digg.

So, if Digg users are not faithful users for returning to your site and do not click ads what else can they offer… one positive aspect of being Dugg is that Digg users generally offer comments about the site. On One hand these comments can serve as valuable critical criticism for the Dugg website. On the other hand these comments can also be tedious to go through and are often shallow, reflecting a similar single minded perspective.

What about the SEO benefits of Digg? Although being Dugg has shown some results in SEO page rank on google, it more often than not fails to work. In fact, the general trend is that the actual Digg of a website is considered more relevant by google than the actual site being Dugg. To try to use Digg as a SEO tool is difficult and unrewarding.

In conclusion, while Digg is a great site to use and have fun with, from my research, I feel that Digg is merely a parasite doing more harm than good. Sure a smaller site gains more exposure, but it is temporary and comes with the likely potential of huge costs through crashing your server with only a small and unlikely chance for benefit.

For a more positive perspective on Digg as it relates to other websites check out the blog post Digg Effect: Top Ten Things Webmasters Should Know.