"Do you find this page useful?" That's a question that used to appear on the bottom of Web pages. You could click yes or no, or maybe even send a note to the publisher, and it was good. For the publisher. Ultimately, your feedback might have influenced the site owner to improve the site, but it was a slow process, and the feedback loop was not transparent, so you, the user, couldn't see what impact you were making.

The new thing in feedback, at least for tech sites, is to flag a story on Digg.com. If you don't know it, Digg is a fantastic site that collects pointers to Web links (stories, blog entries, and so on) from its users. Links that are popular bubble up to the top of the list. Users of Digg then see these links, and if they also like them, they click a little Digg It button to add another vote. It appears under a square box--called a chiclet by some (like me)--that lists the number of votes the link got. Del.icio.us is similar in some ways. (For a cool mashup of Digg and Del.icio.us, see DiggLicious.com, which displays new Digg and Del.icio.us links in real time, as they are posted.)

There are dozens of other social bookmark sites. Some focus on different topics (such as video) or have interesting user interface fillips. But they are all about the same thing: enabling members of a community to share the content they like the best.

The Digg effect
Digg now rivals Slashdot as the most important nonsearch driver of links to technology sites, which is leading many tech publishers to consider two things: first, how they can get users to Digg their stories and, second, how they can add Digg-like functionality to their own sites.

The easy way for publishers to hasten their entry into the Digg ecosystem is to add a Digg It button or link to pages on their sites. Surprisingly, considering the importance of Digg, few publishers have done this. Our sister site, ZDNet, has some buttons on its blog entries. It's more common to see Add To Del.icio.us links on stories, perhaps because the coding required for that is slightly simpler than the unsupported code it takes to add a Digg It link.

Digg-like voting systems are taking off on other sites. The community search tool Wink, for example, allows users to vote on results, using Digg-like chiclets. The RSS readers Rojo and Newsvine also have voting. Like Digg, these services collect stories from around the Internet, and the voting system helps them rank relevance so that they can present users with better results.

Coming to a site near you
I will not be surprised when content sites begin adding local chiclet voting to their stories. By local, I mean sites may simply use a Digg-like interface to allow users to flag stories they like. The sites can then present these stories on their front page as "most popular." Even if the stories are not submitted to any social or community link sites, such as Digg, it's a good thing for improving relevance on a site. More clicks on chiclets mean a more popular story, and the popular stories get promoted highly, which makes the site seem better.

At some point, chiclet voting may work for both local sites and roll-up sites such as Digg. For example, we may soon be able to vote on a story and have it flagged on the story's own site, as well as on Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, or any other combination of social bookmark sites.

Ultimately, all these voting and bookmarking tools help publishers, by providing information on which stories are popular and which are not. When publishers, bloggers, or site managers see massive traffic coming to a story from Digg, they know they've hit on the right formula, and chances are they'll be thinking about ways to do more stories like that one. It's a virtuous circle. So when you read a story you like and you see an option to vote on it by submitting your vote to a bookmarking service, go ahead and do it. You'll be doing good work for the publisher, and in return, you'll be improving the sites you like the most.

And yes, if you like this story, you can Digg it and add it to Del.icio.us.