So far the stark competitor to Digg, Yahoo! Buzz that was launched in February this year was available only to a handful of invited publishers who were able to post news to Buzz. This was seen as a completely biased move, as those stories that did make the Yahoo! home page saw incredible volumes to traffic to that particular website.

The Microsoft Live Labs blog announces Lista's, Microsoft's Technology Preview Tool.

“Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users. We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you can think of.

Below is our coverage of Day 1 of SMX Social Media New York

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon

EbizMBA has a list of top ten social bookmarking sites ranked by a combination of Compete and Quantcast data. Digg has expected tops them all.

1. Digg.com
2. Netscape.com
3. Del.icio.us
4. StumbleUpon.com
5. Reddit.com
6. Slashdot.org
7. BlinkList.com
8. Furl.net
9. Newsvine.com
10. ShoutWire.com

For a detailed analysis checkout the complete post.

The social media has emerged with a boom during the past few years. The social media sites enables a website or a blog with good content to generate traffic as well as create awareness.

Lee Odden in his post on Social Media Marketing informs about the essential characteristics of a social media community. 

• Create profiles/accounts
• Grow a network of friends

In January we informed that 'ACS is launching a new personalized social media search tool, Serph, which will enable the users to know what other people are commenting over the web at the moment'. Cameron Olthius informs that Serph has left beta.

Cameron says, “We're bringing Serph out of beta today. We first mentioned our reputation management tool; Serph, a couple of months ago and we're now ready for it to be open to the public.”

An article on SEOmoz written by Jane, 'How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message' covers about thirty sites that one can make use of for marketing.

TechCrunch has informed that Pheedo Launches Social Media Ad Widgets:

RSS ad network Pheedo will announce a new service tonight – advertising widgets powered by RSS and incorporating several social media tools. Readers familiar with Techmeme’s advertising program will recognize the ideas here – companies today are producing creative content to drive visitors to their websites and that content can be leveraged explicitly as advertising. Pheedo hopes to make this approach scalable and widely deployed. The widgets can be placed on any web page and in many other ad networks.

This is what I spotted at Center Networks and could not help reproducing here.

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“If search engines were never invented or they ceased to exist tomorrow, how would you build traffic to your website in a searchless world?”

Not a pleasant question but the answer to it might open up new ways of getting high quality traffic. Brian Provost has a great post about alternate modes of attracting traffic on the internet. It is a comprehensive list some of which are very general by now, however, there are a few others which are worth the read.