MappingTheWeb //

The following guest post was written by social media expert and blogger Steve Spalding. He can be found on the web at How To Split An Atom or History of Blogging.

The great thing about family is that you can always count on them.

They’re there for you when times are hard, when the chips are down, when you need support. Kind of like Social Media.

You can also count on them to fight, feud and frustrate you to no end. To be the thorn that your side has always been missing. Kind of like Social Media.

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Social media is extremely powerful and scalable. It leverages the crowds to spur rapid growth. However, the very mechanism that enables this growth is often exploited in a counterproductive manner via cheating and “gaming”.

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The basis of social media revolves around user participation and crowdsourcing. The ultimate goal is to provide the best quality content via a combination of user-generated content (UGC) and a filtering process. In theory, the larger the user base, the more likely the best content gets highlighted.

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There is a fundamental problem with Digg. The site tends to favour content from big blogs and media publishers. Meanwhile, content from less prominent blogs and web-publishing entities remains in the shadows, unknown to most. This isn’t the fault of Digg itself, as the site relies entirely on user voting and participation. The flaw in the system can be traced back to the perception of users.

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Almost every blog has a blogroll. It is the notable list of links to other blogs that the author finds interesting and/or valuable. Most bloggers find it easy to add blogs to the list. But for some political reason, many find it hard to delete such links as they want to steer clear of potential tension created with the affected party.

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