The Internet is a wonderful place with plenty of possibilities, every trend, concept or successful website create a sub-industry to make the first better. Being able to add to a successful trend is a very good business decision. Sometimes when the main trends disappear its helpers goes with it. However the fact they are available may help it to stay alive.
Search engines were there for a long time, but then there were many of them, and add to them all the different directories, it became a hard work. So Search engines submitters started appearing and the mission became easier.
The Web2.0 and the blogging phenomenon is an extreme example of how nested such a concept be.
Blogs are everywhere, everyone is writing, but you cannot find anything, here comes Digg, and Technorati to solve the problem, and they allow users to recommend blog posts. The bookmarking concept is not new, it goes back to the time the Netscape was available and students all over the world uploaded their bookmark.html page to the web. Today they took a different shape and its now called social bookmarking (due to the social networking concept of these sites) but there are so many of them and it can take days to bookmark your site on all of them. To solve this problem came Addthis.com that offer a widget with links to all social bookmarking pages, including Digg and Technorati,
Now we are left with only one problem that need to be solved: how do we register to all these social bookmarking sites with a single form ? Because its one hell of a mission. Don't worry a solution will come, somebody is probably already working on this.
Why is this bookmarking so important ? Because most social bookmarking sites are highly ranked in the Google and Yahoo and by linking your site/blog from a top ranked website, your own ranking is getting far better.
Like in every market when there is a need there is always someone that will comes up with an application to fill this gap, and by filling this gap he is usually creating a new gap that will be filled by someone else and so on.
Take for example the Digital photography. Knowing and using Photo editing software will make your digital photos better. Despite the fact that every digital camera comes with a photo editing software, and that there are hundreds of free and commercial software available on line and in the stores, despite all these hundreds of websites appeared with little applications that does what the user need each one provide a single solution (while any software provide them all). So another gap was filled, the user does not have to learn anything about the software all he have to do is look for the specific feature on line, the problem in most cases is that he doesn't know what to look for).
Frankly, even though I admire the way things develop on line I am not sure I like it this way. There is a complete generation that uses a computer without knowing what it is, the surf the web without learning what it means, that does not speak the language. Sooner or later they will not even be able to tell the technician what is their problem in a language he will understand. When everything is so simple why bother learning.