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Anyone who has faced what Ernest Hemingway called famously "The great white bull that is blank paper" in undertaking any major writing assignment knows the terror of wondering whether their efforts will ever amount to anything. Days, weeks, then months go by. The words come slowly. Doubts creep in. Is this really any good? Am I choosing the right words, the right materials, the right points? The end is reached, you struggle with your publisher over the minutiae of grammar, phrasing, packaging and credits - and then it's done. But there's nothing tangible to show for all of that effort, save the bits and bytes that bring the online draft alive as content.

Then one day the doorbell rings and the delivery man helps you carry in a couple of heavy boxes. You know what's in them, yet even as you are cutting open the seals it's a little surreal to think that the content that you've collected from so many talented people and crafted into something unique can actually be touched. You fold back the lid and hold the first copy of your first book in your hands.

You're an author. For real.

I've always defined content as information and experiences that provide value to an audience in specific contexts. Seeing Content Nation shift from an online context to a print context underscores in my mind how social media is about stimulating conversations in valuable contexts. I expect that this book will stimulate many conversations, both online and in person, around the world. The book will be influential in its own way. But like Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet from the U.S. War of Independence that I highlight in the book, print is just the stimulus for the more pervasive influence of social media conversations.

Where does social media go from here? The book offers some very compelling insights as to where social media may be taking us now and well into humanity's future. But ultimately the future of social media is you - the citizens of Content Nation who influence people every day through their own content. If you have any doubt that this is so, just read the book. I highlight not just the big names in social media but the everyday people in personal and professional roles around the world who are making a difference in their own lives and the lives of others because they have the courage to be a citizen publisher. Will you ever be famous from doing it? Who knows. But like the people who read Common Sense, the end results of people taking action based your influence will be famous enough in time.

I do hope that you have a chance to read the book in hard copy, it's a good look at just about every aspect of social media in a perspective that will make you begin to realize just how enormous its influence on human history will be. The people who have contributed to its success are acknowledged fully in the book, but may I thank you all again for having been citizens of Content Nation. You made the book possible through your inspiring publishing. If you like the book please make it a point to leave a review on the major book-buying site of your choice (Amazon's the biggie, of course, but I don't endorse it specifically). Let the world know how important Content Nation has become to your own work, your own life and your own future.

Thanks!

During the holidays I had a chance to enjoy some kick-back time in front of the television, including a show on the National Geographic Channel called "Lost Cities of the Amazon." Usually these types of shows turn out to have a thimble's worth of useful information and a lot of filler, but this was a very interesting look into the work of Michael Heckenberg, an anthropoligist from the University of Florida who has been studying the remnants of an ancient civilization that has all but disappeared from the Amazon rain forest.

When Spanish explorers first came upon this ancient society in 1542, they described an immense civilization stretching for miles across the Amazon basin, encompassing dozens of large settlements, each arranged neatly in circles with major roads leading out on the points of the compass to similarly constructed settlements dotted across the Amazon. They also described a very prosperous civilization, with an abundance of food harvested from rich farmlands. To modern people this seemed very hard to believe: the natural soil of the Amazon forest is actually quite poor, unsuitable for any large-scale agriculture without modern fertilizers. Moreover, there were no signs of any major settlements as had been formed in other parts of South America and no stone to speak of in most of the local Amazon basin with which to build them. The tales of the Spanish conquistadors seemed to be unbelievable at best.

But in the 1990s Heckenberg began to explore the Amazon and to interview some of the primitive tribes in the area. It turned out that in fact they were living in the remnants of the cities of this civilization, which has left behind extraordinarily rich soil that was still being used by these tribes centuries later for some of their food supply. This August Heckenberg announced his astounding findings. This ancient civilization had in fact formed a network of dozens of towns that sustained millions of people at its peak, just as the Spanish explorers had seen them, but in a far different form than most people had imagined them. These were relatively simple communities, some larger than others but mostly repeating a very similar pattern of circular settlements with wooden and leaf huts and broad central areas in the middle of the settlements open to all in the community. Separately the settlements may have seemed to be relatively insignificant, but in sum they were awesome in their scale. Most probably the only thing that had brought the civilization down was the introduction of European diseases from the Spanish visitors. With few signs of settlements left on the broad Amazon plains, they simply vanished into the rain forest, with hardly a bump in the landscape to show their former sites.

I bring this up on Content Nation as a reminder that the shape of societies formed through social networks can be powerful but of a very different shape and form than those that we're used to seeing in our societies formed around highly centralized publishing. When marketers and advertisers look at social media outlets, they can become very frustrated at times, because they just don't work the way that typical publications work. Like farming the Amazon, it is possible to adapt mass-marketing techniques to social media, but the natural form of social media is not very well adapted to their strengths. Broadcasting messages to millions of people from a single central source turns out not to be as powerful and sustainable in social media as cultivating relationships in a networked environment that can be used to harvest rewards from those relationships over longer periods of time than is usually found in mass marketing efforts. Moreover, just as is happening in the Amazon jungles, the by-products of mass marketing techniques used in social media tend to "pollute" the very things that help to sustain social media: honest person-to-person influence, truly grass-roots social networks and a focus on things that sustain personal relationships. They are built not on scare resources but abundant resources managed wisely.

It's important to recognize that the civilization that is taking form around social media may result in something that is very different from our current civilization. Like the lost cities of the Amazon, which would form a circle around a common empty space for the community rather than a central icon, social media communities are powerful but their power does not derive from a central source. It is a civilization that is in some ways more fragile, but in many ways more adaptable to the environment that it faces with less need for capital expenditure but more need for personal commitment. Yet in spite of this it can produce enormous value to the people who work to sustain it, enabling deep, rich relationships that are flexible enough to be reformed as need be when all but the most encompassing disaster strikes. Even as social media is growing in its influence, many still imagine that it will create gleaming "cities of gold" for publishers. The truth is that publishing empires built on social media are more likely to resemble the lost cities of the Amazon, vast in their influence and their power to sustain powerful marketing relationships but in a form that is in many ways completely different from the empires of traditional publishing.

Scientists are preparing to take on an experiment in cloning that gives me pause to think about what I was laying out in the Content Nation book about a future built around social media that looks remarkably like our past. According to Environmental Graffiti and other sources scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have reported they have sequenced a large portion of the wooly mammoth genome from samples extracted from mammoths fast-frozen more than ten thousand years ago in Siberia. Plans are sprouting up for a Jurassic Park-style cloning of mammoths that could begin to walk the plains of the Arctic again - or, more likely, at some zoos where a fast buck could be turned on their novelty.

In Chapter 10 of Content Nation I outline how mammoths would be fairly common zoo specimens in fifty years, creatures that would be likely to profit from a drastic change of our climate into ice-age conditions. From a few isolated groups we could see the re-emergence of mammoths in much the same way that massive wild buffalo herds were restored to the northern plains of America. Given a chance, many of nature's best ideas are never too far from being re-enacted in new contexts. So it is with social media, which returns everyday people to our ice-age roots as non-heirarchical publishers building powerful bonds of altruism and endorsement with one another.

But as with our potentially reconstituted mammoths today's social media finds people communicating amongst peers in familiar ways in a much different environment through advanced engineering. We're able to communicate ideas more naturally to one another through social media, but in today's world our highly scalable publishing technologies allow our shout-outs to be heard around the world by anyone. Our tribes in Content Nation are closely knit, yet global and potentially any size on any day. There may come a day in thousands of years when we are literally chasing mammoths again for a good meal, but the rewards of social media are more likely to take us to more everyday rewards realized more quickly than those from your typical mammoth hunt.

In the next few years I think that we'll begin to see these rewards begin to affect commerce more directly. eBay and Craigslist opened up person-to-person global and local personal sales channels in a powerful way, but they have had little impact on how people in real-world communities interact with one another. As social media enables local communities to engage with one another more effectively I do think that we'll see a revitalization of local and niche merchants enabled by powerful social media relationships. Person-to-person and community lending will also improve, if we can get the government to support it more completely (see my next post on the SEC shutting down Prosper and other social media lending networks). Our High Streets/Main Streets may look the same fifty years from now, but they will have been transformed - and, perhaps, saved - by social media's ability to match "birds of a feather" more efficiently than ever before.

So bring on those new mammoths, and any other ice-age creatures that may augur our reversion to the ice ages. With social media we'll be ready for radical changes - and we'll be able to survive and to thrive with one another as never before. Hmm, bit a of a nip in the air, wouldn't you say?

I've been noticing in recent days some small, gray icons that appear next to my Google search results along with a comments balloon, signs of a new search feature that Google calls "SearchWiki." As wiki inventor Ward Cunningham noted on ReadWriteWeb the term "wiki" is kind of a misnomer for this new feature, following Google's annoying habit of avoiding or misapplying many Web 2.0 terms for their offerings.That may very well be true, but it's an interesting take on a number of social media functions that could turn out to be very powerful in the long run.

A wiki is a collaboratively edited Web site that brings together people of common interests to define mutually useful information using easy-to-use authoring tools. SearchWiki doesn't resemble a traditional wiki in any stretch of the imagination: it's more a tool that allows you to collect your own thoughts about Web pages on a topic and to share notes with others. A logged-in Google user can knock up an item in their Google search results to the top of the page or eliminate it from the results. Google users can also leave comments on a given link or add a link of their own by typing it into a box at the bottom of the "SearchWiki" (read: search results) page. In theory the primary use of this feature is to serve as a note-taker for an individual person, kind of like the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool set to a private mode. But if you click on the "All notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of a search results page and things may - may - get more interesting.

The "may" part of the equation is that when you are fortunate enough to have a search query that others have Googled you might discover SearchWiki data on how other people voted a search result up or down and comments that Google users have left on the result. Comments in turn can be voted up or flagged as inappropriate. This is a feature set that's closer in functionality to a social bookmarking service like Digg that enables people to see what other people find interesting on a given topic. In sum these features are a bizarre form of parallel play. You can comment on a search result, but you cannot reply to a specific comment: sorry, no room for moderating flame wars amongst billions of possible search results pages. You also cannot link to a Google user's profile. The name of the user is displayed without a hyperlink. So if you're lucky enough to search for something that others look at with some regularity you might get a sense of what pages other people found to be important - without any of the sophisticated ranking of users that one finds in Digg.

SearchWiki is kind of interesting in and of itself, but it's probably more interesting for what it could become rather than what it is today. In its current form SearchWiki makes it hard for people to stumble upon pages that others find to be interesting: you have to hit a search result that has SearchWiki content to make any real use of it. But as Google collects SearchWiki content, it's building a kind of stealth Digg social bookmarking service on a much more granular and useful scale that underscores Google's prime mission: make money from its core search assets. Google AdWords contextual ads get served up on SearchWiki search results pages, providing both user-generated content along with ads focused on highly contexual topics. This may point out to one key reason that Google has yet to pull the trigger on a Digg deal. Digg's social bookmarking technology does well for placing ads against broad topics but it's not much for the kinds of narrow topics that attract people to Google searches. In going "home-grown" on SearchWiki, Google can get many of the benefits of a Digg-like service that matches up better with its revenue-generating capabilities.

The more interesting question, though, might be what would happen if Google decided to make its Orkut social networking service available to all Google users. With a personal profile available for each comment or search result, SearchWiki would make it far easier to bring "birds of a feather" together through the millions of highly focused topics served up by SearchWiki. Tack on a browser tool that would make it easy for anyone to bookmark a link to a SearchWiki topic and you'd have a highly topical social networking tool that could start to build communities around Google search content pretty effectively. Google is not known for strong product management, so I don't expect this kind of integration to surface any time soon, but one senses that SearchWiki is far more than another random "cool feature" that has escaped Google Labs. SearchWiki may not look exactly like a wiki or any other kind of social media tool out there today, but if it helps Google to keep its search engine plumped up with highly engaging social media content then it may be enough to make a marked difference for Google.

When Google's Lively virtual reality platform made its debut in July it rode a PR tsunami, enough to attract more traffic than VR king Second Life for a few days. But it didn't take too long for people to discover that Lively had potential but was unfortunately just another Google social media project that came out of the box less-than-half-baked in both business concept and features. A few days ago I poked my head into my virtual room on Lively to see if much had changed for the better. Well, the software actually worked and the navigation tools had improved, but overall little had changed. Most disappointing was that one of the most potentially interesting features - embedded video and Web pages - was still a work in progress. Not very encouraging.

It's not surprising, then, when word came today that Google was going to pull the plug on its Lively beta at the end of the year. Pack your virtual bags, take a snapshot of your online crib before you hit the road - it's done. Mashable's Stan Schroeder has a good writeup of how Lively is but one of a lengthening string of recent Google failures, with most of them focused on the social media space. Stan points out rightly that with the partial exception of its regionally successful Orkut social networking community Google has not been able to build community-oriented social media properties. Even Google's Blogger weblog publishing tool, which has a very healthy and growing cut of the blogging services market, has been slow to recover from major traumas suffered by its users late last year. It would appear that social media just hasn't been Google's thing in many ways. But the larger issue for Google is the bottom line: there didn't appear to be much of a coherent strategy for monetizing Lively, while more troops are needed elsewhere to make sure that their Apps software-as-a-services platform and its core search and advertising can fend off strengthening efforts from Microsoft.

That said, it seems that with the exception of flirting, product demos and job interviews virtual reality communities just haven't gone much of anywhere beyond a small slice of devotees. Apparently the real world with real people is a pretty good place after all. This isn't very surprising: visualization tools are still very primitive overall, providing only a small slice of what people really want out of a real social interaction. In the meantime mobile platforms are making it more important for people to have social media supporting their exploration of the real world through a mounting explosion of software tools that make it easier to see people for real where they are in the moment. Google's Lively had a lot of innovative gestures that could have taken people towards embedding virtual communities in the right places, but the experience itself was not worth tuning in.

In Chapter 10 of the Content Nation book I offer a glimpse into a future where holograms have merged with social media to provide realistic interactions with real people in real places - or ideal places, depending on the situation. I think that something along these lines is far more likely to become a universal sort of avatar-driven virtual reality than the hermetically sealed universes of Second Life and Lively. People may still dress up in flashy outfits or alter egos via holograms, but in most instances I think that it's going to be like in the book - friends from anywhere in the world joining one another around a cafe table to chat about real things. We get this today already in a primitive way from services like Qik that allow people to invite their friends via video to join whatever scene their phone cameras are pointed towards and services like Brightkite that cue our contacts into what places we're visiting and what things are happening near our GPS-enabled phones. These are much more interesting steps towards virtual realities that mean something to people in the real world.

There will always be a place for escaping reality altogether, but experience seems to show that the most successful social media plays are those that enable people in the real world to interact with other people who they care about in the real world most effectively. On that note we bid a somewhat fond farewell to Lively, but really it's a more fond hello to the services that are connecting us to Content Nation in the real world far more effectively than ever before.

I had the privilege of speaking today at the Future Trends 2008 conference in Miami Beach, a get-together of forecasters and seers from many different sectors in business and market research. Future Trends has a consumer slant, so it was a different mix than many of the conferences that I attend, but given the nature of Content Nation I was glad to have a venue like Future Trends to excercise my slide deck for the book. There were a lot of interesting presentations at Future Trends, some of which were somewhat gloom-and-doom but many of which were embracing the global changes to culture that have Content Nation at their center.

On the negative side of the forecast there were a wide variety of slides showing how every exponential curve in the world was about to reach "the singularity" or come crashing down. The environment, the economy, you name it - the recent economic challenges in the global economy have the fear-mongers working overtime.

But there were was overall much more optimism from the presenters than gloom, in part because they were very plugged into the global changes that are developing new markets that are developing into the worldwide foundation of Content Nation. Jeff Yang of iconoculture highlighted how in China, Brazil and other rapidly emerging markets. I was particularly interested in Jerry's higlighting of "star children," China's emerging generation of young women who were born during China's "one child" family policy. Because young women were the only shot at having children for many families, the importance of the success of these young women has broken down many patriarchial barriers in China.

While Jeff's presentation was coming from a different angle than mine, I think that we both agree that social media is at the center of a new generation of independent and self-assured people who are using social media to be activists on many fronts and who already have had an enormous impact on the pace of social and business change in the world. One presenter eyeballed the rate of likely technology change in the 21st century to beomce 80 times that of the 20th century. That may turn out to be true for all I know, but I think that we're going to see a "big sombrero" model being applied to that change. In other words, there will be indeed enormous technology change in the 21st century but a lot of it will be propogated via social media to local and global niche markets. We're  not going to see ten thousand new ways to build a light bulb, but we may wind up with ten thousand ways to generate light around the world tied into national and global standards for electricity generation, for example.

This is similar to the diversity that I highlight in the Content Nation book, of course. In Chapter 8, you'll see that the players of the explosively popular computer game Spore generated more than 3 million types of evolving creatures for the game in just a few months before its launch, twice the number of known species in the world. If social media is the DNA for a new kind of civilization, it's important to remember that this new kind of civilization is not going to be all one monolithic culture. The "big sombrero" model reminds us that in social media the value created in an enormous number of small, highly focused groups of people is likely to be greater than that created by that created by mass groups focused on mass culture. We are at the brink of creating more types of civilizations and cultures with social media as their "glue" than we can possibly imagine today.

The other neat thing that was highlighted at Future Trends 2008 was the generation of human tissue such as organs and thumbs from genetic "cloning" experiments. Looking at these experiments and thinkiing of what I highlighted in Chapter 10 of the book about how social media will eventually be offered to people through organic implants and organic computing and wireless computing. Perhaps my thoughts about people a thousand years in the future adapting social media into their human DNA is not so far-fetched. Perhaps I am too conservative as to when this may happen!

Anyhow, it was a great conference, I recommend it strongly for executives looking for fresh perspectives on their markets and major trends.

The use of social media technology in the 2008 U.S. elections is well documented in Chapter 6 of the Content Nation book, but now that the election is over social media's impact on an incoming administration in Washington has been rather an unknown. Enter Change.gov, a new Web site launched just three days after the election that is designed to continue the social media communication methods that were leveraged successfully in the campaign by many candidates. While not fully open for business - there is a registration process that is not quite fully functional - the main portions of the site enable people to subscribe to the incoming Obama administration's weblog, contribute ideas as to how the new administration should tackle the nation's issues and a signup for jobs in the new administration.

In structure and concept it is not so different from the Obama campaign Web site, but it establishes a strong hint of things to come with a change of power in Washington. The White House has had a Web site for well over a decade and even today there are opportunities to communicate with the office of the President and administration officials. There are even RSS feeds and podcasts for people wanting to keep track of specific streams of information coming from the White House. But the Change.gov Web site is less about communicating information than it is communicating politically with a nation that has just chosen a new President. The fact that Change.gov is more like a social media campaign Web site than an administator's Web site indicates that this new administration in Washington is intent on using social media to continue to influence the political dialogue in Washington much as it did on the campaign trail.

Does this mean that we will see the beginnings of a highly accessible "open source" government? With the emphasis on fighting terrorism in recent years, many Washington institutions have been struggling to present a more open face to the public. To make this attitude towards citizen publishing pervasive throughout the government will require both commitment and investment. But it all starts at the top, so there's reason to believe that the Change.gov site is an indication that social media's impact on a government's communications and actions has only just begun. It is also an opportunity for an incoming President to become the President of all of his nation by soliciting feedback and interactions with citizens in a non-partisan manner and to motivate them in the directions that will help them to make progress on critical issues.The tools of the campaign are now becoming the tools of influencing a sitting government.

Come January Mr. Obama will move into the White House, but in the meantime this incoming Publisher-In-Chief already has a virtual White House in place and has invited his nation and the world in for a housewarming. That in and of itself is cause for celebration in a world that is struggling to build and to strengthen its governments in challenging times. But the fact that this virtual house is themed to be a place for citizens as much as for politicians is a strong sign that this is likely to be the first President of the United States that will master social media as an influential political tool of governance in the way that earlier Presidents mastered newspapers, radio and television. We'll see just how open this initiative really becomes, but in the meantime the conversation has begun. Content Nation is in the house - the White House, that is.

In Chapter 6 of Content Nation I highlight the evolution of social media into a powerful tool that influences both opinions and actions in today's politics around the world. Certainly one aspect of this year's dramatic U.S. election that has struck me is its global impact as well as its national impact. People around the world are celebrating in the streets as if this was their election. What aspects of social media do you think have played the most important part in the outcome of this election and how do you think that the American election will influence other nations to use social media more aggressively for their own political processes? Share your thoughts with other Content Nation members and the world in our new forum topic on this subject .

The Huffington Post's Ariana Huffington offers up her take on the U.S. election's big winner - the Internet - but her own site is featuring prominently one of the real social media winners this election: embedded content on social media Web sites. While many traditional news organizations struggled to get an audience edge in an election season that was powered in many ways by the voices of people empowered by social media, sites such as the HuffPost excelled at aggregating widgets, embedded videos and links to content from sites around the Web along with a thin layer of newwire content and their own rotating crew of guest columnists.

On the evening of Election Day HuffPost is featuring a rotating gallery of widgets indicating poll closing times, an electoral vote tracker for the Presidential race, a live vote total tracker and election results widgets from CBS News, CNN and MSNBC. Each of these widgets is a useful tool, but the ability to aggregate them in a place that's a favorite for many political enthusiasts is the beauty of the contexts that social media publishing tools enable them to exploit. It's also a reminder that when news is about real-time events data and graphics are key content types that attract and retain audiences more effectively than text and, oftentimes, video. No wonder that HuffPost kept this rotating gallery of widgets as the "headline story" as the results prepared to come in. More to the point, as a part of their brand-building efforts sites like MSNBC make it easy for anyone to embed these widgets into their sites: it's no longer a huge deal to get this kind of content from a major media outlet into any Web site, including their video content from their proprietary videos that are embedded easily via the industry standard technologies that power social media.

Who will win tonight? We will. As I outline in Chapter 6 of the Content Nation book, the truly amazing impact of social media is in how it has enabled everyday people to have an influence over political processes as never before. In days past it took influential newspapers, books and broadcasters to set the center of the political dialogue. Today social media has brought us the electronic "cracker barrel," the ability of citizens to collect at an electronic commons, similar to how people in small towns used to gather around a cracker barrel or pot-bellied iron stove in a local general store and pass back and forth opinions and insights to their peers. It's also given us the ability to fund candidates who we support, creating a new political power from average citizens that used to be reserved mostly for the wealthy and major businesses. This is only one nation's experience with this technology, of course, but it bodes well for the future of all of Content Nation.

It's my privilege to have worked with Reid Conrad and the team at Near-Time, mostly as a client of theirs and occasionally as a strategy collaborator, and a pleasure to have watched their collaborative social media publishing service bloom into a really robust publishing tool. The features keep coming, the utility continues to accelerate and its ability to convert a general idea into a full-blown, multi-tier publishing service that can make one amazingly productive. I think that Reid and I saw the same market gaps for social media and he's gone a great distance in just a couple of years in closing them.

I found that out not too long ago when I whipped up a demo for my church of a new version of its aging and neglected Web site. Tweaked a Near-Time template graphics to create a custom banner, cut and pasted in some content from the existing site - with hardly any mods required, a miracle right there - plugged in RSS feeds from stored queries for specific types of content into the front page, including events listings, built a few public and private categories, set some permissions and within a few hours the whole thing was done. Here is a site that can be updated by any number of members, serve both the members and the public with both public and members-only content and navigation, drive events and projects, help people to discuss key topics and to share links with other nearby institutions, makes setting up sophisticated permissioning a breeze and comes with built-in navigation and search tools that are really great for bridging that gap between "our collaboration portal" and "our Web portal." Near-Time is a great and highly usable tool for publishing that combines the best of blog and wiki technology with the best of collaborative tools suitable for membership-driven organizations that need to have a strong public and private presence with as little in-house technical know-how as possible.

As with any young technology sometimes things get a bit of a bump on the head when a new version comes out, but the Near-Time team turns fixes around pretty quickly and is always improving usability. I've been waiting for that time to tell you "Yeah, it's ready now," and I think that it's just about there, finally. About the only things that I'd really like to see from it now are better placement of social bookmarking tools, some flexibility in pre-setting the order of user-adjustable sidebar content and a way to enable a membership layer on their premium-model platform that does not require premium signup. That's a pretty short list, I think. Once these things are in place, it will be pretty unbeatable for membership-based/subscription-based collaborative publishing on a services model platform. I am looking at using Near-Time for a number of upcoming projects in addition to its current use for driving Content Nation, so my hope is that this can be a platform that's capable of driving both revenue and traffic. I'll keep you posted, but for now I'd suggest signing up for a trial site and mucking around with it a bit. I think that you'll be duly impressed. Yes, it's a plug, but a very well-deserved one.

CNET social media blogger Caroline McCarthy covers the speech of Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference  in London, where he focused on Digg's efforts to widen its audience appeal. While Rose confirmed that 30 million fans of Digg showing up on your doorstep each month was a great thing, he is starting to focus on how to broaden Digg's audience and to improve is relevance to specific audiences. Digg's registered users total about three million according to Rose, which is a sizeable number of people to drive active content bookmarking and discussions, but Kevin is still looking for ways to harvest more usable meaning from the data that Digg accumulates. Already Digg is using data from members who are apparent "trend setters" to power its beta-feature "Upcoming" view of content categories, but he intends to make it easier for people to find content with people who have the same affinities automatically. I assume that this means something like "Amazoning" Digg content (people who liked this also liked...), which is a good step in the right direction, but a fairly small step given Digg's overall impact on the Web.

Digg has done a lot over the past year to improve its usability and readability, but the potential for social bookmarking still outweighs its realized value in many instances. Here are a few thoughts as to how Digg and other social bookmarking services (and the media outlets that benefit from them) can work better:

• Invest big in "Diggable ads." Right now advertising in social media is suffering from a dearth of endorsement power as people concentrate more on content that's been endorsed by their peers via services such as Digg. Digg is looking at how to make ads "Dugg," which is likely to be a key factor in returning greater value from online display advertising. Currently the only feedback that advertisers have that an ad is working are click-throughs of one kind or another. Being able to get feedback from audiences that are viewing ads but not necessarily in a context where they want or need to click through can be invaluable feedback for marketers - especially when this behavior can be correlated with demographics and tastes. When audiences see that their like-minded peers are tuned into a marketing campaign it is bound to increase the power of an ad's endorsement - and drive up the revenues from those ads. This is likely also to accelerate the use of ad networks to place sponsored content in a Digg-centric ad network as well.
• Build communities around comments. Although social bookmarking service Newsvine is a mere blip compared to Digg's overall traffic, it has done a good job of creating interest groups focused on key topics and enabling both private and public discussions of those topics. People can read and comment on a group's bookmarks and original articles or they can join a group to contribute their own pieces of content. This enables more focused groups of interest to contribute content that would otherwise get lost in the noise. Digg is probably the best bookmarking service overall in managing the relevance of widely popular topics and does a great job of keeping comments clean, but in general Diggnation's comment threads don't seem to have much topic-specific sense of community around them. Diggers find great content, to be sure, and their system of managing comments is actually quite good - definitely superior to Newsvine's overall - but it lacks a sense of real relationships between the commenters in many instances.
• Focus more on being a publication - and enabling publications. While Digg is a powerful tool to aggregate content, its presentation of content in readable form falls far short of its potential to be an automatically assembled publication for its target audiences. People who have been following along as I have been writing the Content Nation book know how in Chapter 10 's futuristic scenario a person in the future is enjoying his "Diggpaper" that's been assembled automatically for his enjoyment. Digg and services like it should think more carefully about how their front page, topic specific pages and stored searches can be formatted to look more like a publication that people are going to browse as an integrated source. This would mean the application of taxonomies and other tools that are readily available, and it may not be feasible in all topic areas if the content is not deep enough, but if people really are editing content as powerfully as many professionals do then it should think about giving its content more of a "stay a while" look to it.
• Finish the Google deal. The rumbles about pairing Digg with Google have subsided as of late, but thinking of this last point - making more of an editorial presence - most of what Digg needs to do that can be found in Google's news bits, which would certainly benefit from integrated Digg content ratings as well. Digg's potential is expanding far more quickly than its ability to exploit it, especially when it comes to partnering effectively with potential distributors, so a Google deal would mean that it would have far more broad access to partners and channels that would help to turn it into a premier source for news on more fronts and to consolidate its position as the leader in social bookmarking.
  

Digg continues to grow like a weed, but just as Kevin Rose opted for a cleaner haircut lately it's time for Digg to focus on reaping its potential more effectively. I'd say a doubling of its un