The social potential of the internet has always held a fascination for some of its users. While to some people it’s nothing special that they can sit in their home in Manchester and leave a comment on a blog in Canada, to others it’s a sign of how society will operate in the future. These signs have been watched very carefully over the years, sometimes with a little intervention by some people to further the experiment along. Such people are the founders of Digg, one of the most successful social bookmarking sites.

The site was founded in 2004 by internet entrepreneurs Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky and Kevin Rose. The four wanted to see what would happen if the power to determine news was handed to the general community. This curiosity was far from new, as competitor Del.ic.ious had been around for some time, but the success of Digg outstripped other social bookmarkers.

Digg: changing the world

The site caused such a splash because usually, news is delivered to the public via a strict hierarchy. In traditional print news, the news writers are at the bottom of the power structure, handing up news to sub editors, who themselves are under the control of a head editor, who in turn has to acknowledge the power of the paper’s owners. The public are at the very bottom of this hierarchy, supplying stories for the paper but with no control over which stories are handed back to them.

When content moved online, nothing much changed. Even when independent sites began to assemble lists of interesting articles, the articles to make the list were decided on by in-house editors.

How does Digg affect the average site?

Digg is a part of a trend that hands power back to the general community, and this is good news for the average site owner. Instead of having to broker influence with ten or so influential editors, site owners can now try to appeal to the average internet user. This means that the average site has a better chance of success, just because of the sheer numbers involved. It also means that a business doesn’t necessarily have to have powerful connections to make it big on the net.

Search engine optimisation companies are doing their best to take advantage of this democratic system. Appealing to Digg and other social bookmarking organisations has become important for the success of any website. Many companies are including some form of social media optimisation, or SMO, as a part of their search engine optimisation plan, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about SMO.

As time goes by, it’s becoming obvious that the average person on the net is the person making the big decisions. How other factors will affect and control the social dynamics which influence the average person’s decisions is still unknown. What is known is the average person’s importance to site success. For both on-page and off-page optimisation, most of the current standard SEO tactics involve appealing to large groups of target users.

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