aggregation

This is a guest post from Josh Schnell, founder of Macgasm.net and web developer.

Somewhere down the line, an exploitation has to occur in order for a financial profit to be realized. This is no less true for the world of social networks. Networks like Digg, FriendFeed, and Facebook are seeing huge growths in value, but the little guys, the ones actually providing the meat and potatoes for those operations, rarely see a nickel.

Let’s be honest for a second here. The major “Web 2.0″ and social networking technologies that have been created in the last several years have been a major boon for consumers and web users. They’ve aggregated the entire Internet into what’s cool and what’s not so cool. When searching for new and interesting websites, it is much preferable to visit a website on a friend’s recommendation than it is to use classic search engines. I’m not disputing the relevancy or success of these technologies to the average internet user. The problem as I see it is from a content creator paradigm, where the content creators are the ones footing the bills for bandwidth usage, paying the writers, and putting tears and sweat into their content so that it becomes sellable.