If you work with computers or the internet you know how much trends affect the industry. The most well known trend is the first Dot-com Boom. As we all know this short period of amazing growth ended up being far worse than no growth at all. However that boom left us with a lot of lessons learned. Keeping up with the trends is a near impossible feat and many who try are stuck on the bleeding edge of things. There is a way to stay up on your news without sacrificing results however to keep their “edge” SEO’s are always looking for the next big thing. The problem is that as soon as one good website is found it is gamed and spammed into oblivion. So much so that many of these websites are forced to undergo change or go out of business entirely.

Looming in the under belly of the SEO world there is a second trend growing. Social websites have become the second boom. Search engine marketers everywhere take full advantage of every social website. Websites like Digg, Myspace, and Squidoo have been gamed, spammed and killed. But despite this fact and the fact that Myspace users are quickly leaving, investors are pouring money into internet ventures. Fox’s buyout of Myspace, Ebay purchasing Skype and now Yahoo is considering buying Facebook. On a smaller scale, confidence in the internet is high. Internet marketers are rushing to the next big social media website and investors are soon to follow suit. The question is, should confidence be as high as it is?

Kevin Rose – Digg

Kevin Rose created a user edited news website called Digg that came out in 2004. Originally the website was just an “experiment” where users could vote stories up or down a.k.a. “Digg” them. This democratic version of the news quickly took off and has grown to be one of the largest and most well known social media websites in existence.

While Digg revolves primarily around tech and science stories, many appear dealing with politics, conspiracies, piracy and a myriad of other controversial topics. In May of 2007 a story appeared on Digg that contained the encryption key for AACS digital rights management, which protects DVD’s and Blu-ray discs. Digg removed all instances of the stories and banned the users who posted it because of the advice of their lawyers. This move created a user revolt where the entire community posted stories about the incident, after much ado Kevin ceded and allowed the story to propagate despite possible legal repercussions.

Tom – Myspace

Myspace is 7th most popular site website in the entire world. It has been hailed as a revolutionary website, connecting users across oceans in a way that has never been done. Myspace founder Tom Anderson teamed up with Chris De Wolf and created this site with only a few small pages and grew to be the number one social media website on the web. Tom Anderson sold Myspace to Intermix Media for a few million dollars, before intermix media was purchase by Fox News Corporations for a tidy sum of about $580 million USD. This was a very controversial move and was considered a questionable investment on the part of Fox, however it has yielded millions since the buyout. Myspace has come under scrutiny as of late because of excessive spam and malicious code.

Seth Godin – Squidoo

Seth Godin is a legend amongst internet marketers. He is famous for writing several popular books relating to search engines and internet marketing. Seth Godin began his rise to fame with the creation of Yoyodyne, one of the first online marketing companies. In 1998 Seth sold his company to Yahoo and then became the Vice President of Permission Marketing at Yahoo. Towards the end of 2005 Seth founded Squidoo, an increasingly popular social media website. Search engine marketers have been using Squidoo for social networking purposes, but recently there has been a large issue of spam which has prevented most Squidoo “lenses” from achieving ranking on Google. Unlike Myspace and Digg, Squidoo still has a great deal of potential as a social website and as a tool for SEO professionals.

Many larger companies have finally recovered from their dot-com fears and have begun to recognize the countless opportunities on the internet. They are purchasing up websites and companies across the board that may give a competitive advantage. Only time will tell what will happen with this 2nd dot-com boom, the social boom, the SEO boom.