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Go Web 2.0 with Open Source and Pligg

It’s getting the point that if you aren’t using some form of Web 2.0 in your online endeavors that you are behind the game by about a year. Web 2.0, and particularly the social aspects of it, is the fastest growing web setup around. Remember when YouTube sold for more than a billion dollars (and it had only been live online for about two years)? It was all because two guys wanted to create a social environment that they and their friends could share videos over.

If you look at some of the newer Web 2.0 items out there like microblogs, they are absolutely starting to dominate the web. Take a look at Twitter’s Alexa results; you will see the rapid growth we are referring to:

The beauty of all of this is open source and what it can provide for you. Many you will already be familiar with Digg. Digg is a social news site that is everywhere right now. Well over 70% of the blogs I read regularly are hooked up with “Digg This” links.

But did you know that you can have your very own niche related social news site similar to Digg? That’s right! And it is Web 2.0 style, open source and fairly new; all that means free, lots of plugins, modules, tweaks, themes and more. I’m talking about Pligg, which is now in beta 9.9.

Pligg is an open source content management system similar to Digg. The coolest part of Pligg is it is completely customizable for your niche. You don’t have to have a Digg clone if you don’t want to. The newest beta release offers more stability and customization than previous versions, with add-on libraries growing fast.

Great for social news, it gives you place where the public can get on and post news, stories, articles, or whatever that they have found interesting across the web. They can vote on other posts, provide comments, just about anything. With various plugins and modules you can add polls, shoutboxes and many other forms of interaction for users to get involved.

Aside from the fact that Pligg provides a great social venue, it also provides the opportunity to market your other endeavors. If you market your Pligg site like you would any other site and start generating traffic, you now have an avenue of promotion that is social in nature and you get to maintain it and call the shots. Pretty cool huh?

To get started with Pligg, first visit www.Pligg.com and download the software to install. You’ll find great info on add-ons in the forums. They have manuals and a forum for assistance if you want to install it yourself. You can also hire a freelance developer to do the install and build a custom template for you from places like www.RentACoder.com.

You now have a basic Pligg site that you can configure with colors, logos, fonts, link actions, and whatever else you may want to do to customize your site. All you have to do is market it, get posts and start making it work for you.