I’ve been an avid fan of Pligg CMS for a long time now. It’s an open source project, allowing anyone to download and run their own social news community similar to Digg and Reddit. I have my own case study for Pligg as well, and recently BizSugar has caught my attention.

The domain and brand of BizSugar has been included on “web 2.0 site” lists and directories for a long time now. However, the recent re-branding and marketing campaign done by the BizSugar team has launched the site into popularity. I’ve seen ads running on Digg, Mixx, and even Mashable among a few other popular sites.

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With web URL shortening services in high demand these days, it’s no wonder adf.ly hadn’t come around sooner. Allowing you the same benefits of other free short URL services, adf.ly allows one big benefit – each pageview you get counts towards a small percentage of CPM costs for advertisers! Long story short, you get paid to use adf.ly’s services.

Although it does seem a bit too good to be true, realistically there is hope for the app. As of right now it appears on each short URL page the visitor is first displayed a content-relevant advertisement. This certainly hinders your quality of content and takes a lot of credibility away from the link poster. However if you’re only in it for the marketing, adf.ly is an interesting alternative to check out.

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It’s difficult these days to track down the best social news sharing communities. There are the classics such as Digg and Reddit, and also smaller niche communities containing topics like design and programming.

Humsurfer is a new community, still running in Beta but holding strong with a PR3 and Alexa Ranking of 1,600. The Humsurfer community is a social news and media sharing community for Indians, very similar to what IndianPad promotes. But with a growing userbase and such an inviting site design, Humsurfer may be claiming this throne.

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Mashable is one huge blog, a very large competitor to Inside the Webb and what I wish we could be someday! They run some amazing articles about social networking, social media, tech news, and everything internet related. They usually have articles hitting the front page of Digg and Delicious, gaining well into 1500+ ReTweets and tons of Stumbles: bottom line, their blog is huge!

What I’ve noticed recently is how much they’re started to endorse Google Buzz. Now this isn’t anything new, as Buzz has blown up since it first launched a few weeks ago. My question is why is Mashable jumping on the bandwagon so fast? Clearly they have some good content for it, but is there really a future for Buzz?

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There are so many great online gaming communities. Video games have taken a huge rise in popularity over the years, and what a better way to celebrate your favorite games than hanging out with like-minded people on a fun and active community? FactPile does just that, collecting all gamers and tech-lovers from around the globe to interact and enjoy the community.

You can share battle stories, hold virtual fights and tournaments, discuss the latest gaming articles or even write your own! The community is extremely vast in what it holds, and you can do virtually anything you want! I got a deeper look inside the site with FactPile’s founder and creator Paul Bliss. Here’s what he had to say about FactPile’s recent and ever-increasing success.

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Starting around December I had seen a lot of blogs posting about Yahoo! considering closing the doors on MyBlogLog. I was sad to hear this news, as I have been a huge fan of MyBlogLog since it first launched in 2005. It was a simple community of bloggers with a simple goal of uniting the best writers and bloggers on the web.

In 2007 Yahoo! bought out the company for a cool $10 million, a swift deal if I do say so myself. MyBlogLog has only grown in popularity since then, closing in on hitting about 300,000 members and ranking with a solid PR7 and Alexa Rank of 1,344. News of Yahoo! closing the site was not only sad, but also very unorthodox: why shut down MyBlogLog when it’s still bringing in so many pageviews and visits daily?

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A few days ago Facebook released their newest design. Nothing has changed on personal profile pages, but when you log into your account you should see some major changes to how everything is layed out. This came as a shock to me when I logged in to check my status for the first time earlier today – a brand new look!

The friendly staff over at FB have covered these updates in a blog post. There aren’t many new features, and the design is actually a lot easier to use than the previous one.

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