Om and Niall PodSessions

We've seen two large user communities take to the virtual streets this week in protest over new and planned updates from Facebook and Digg. Facebook introduced a new way to keep up with your friends and later put up a blog post in an attempt to calm the site's community. Digg announced changes to how it handles story promotion and classifications of top users, causing at least one top user to resign in disgust.

The participatory web has created a two-way relationship between websites and their users. Social sites are reliant upon the contributions of individual nodes to add value to the total power of the network. The site must continue to introduce new features to keep users engaged and to stay ahead of the competition.

The Web is a place of constant change. Companies can either engage with their online communities or watch their brand and user base fall apart as users move to the next best solution. Many of the mini-revolts rapidly emerging in online concentrated communities can be prevented with better communication and adaptability of businesses.

This week's PodSession, User Generated Revolt, is 21 minutes in length, a 20 MB download.