[Note to readers – I am not an early adopter, especially among the early adopters set. So yes, I am just getting into Digg (and you can too), and yes, The Bregar can laugh at me now.]

Digg is flippin’ cool. I added it to this blog last night and I added it to the four blogs I administrate at work today. I even got 3 Diggs on a post I put up at work. How cool (I am easy to please, OK?)

But that is not the point of this post.

As I prepare to give a speech to a room full of people about using blogs for business, I have been wondering how I could effectively demonstrate the power of social networks and help avoid the “isn’t blogging just a fad” question that I know I am going to get.

After attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last week, I was feeling pretty good about blogs/viral/social networking and the like. A great deal of time was spent discussing these topics and I think in every session, no matter what the topic, blogs and blogging was mentioned at least once. Possibly more importantly, influential search marketing types (all of who are bloggers in one way or another) attended the social search/viral sessions. I would argue that these people know what is going on in the online world and their presence was validation to social search/Web 2.0 in some small way.

So after the conference I was feeling pretty good about all of this Web 2.0 type stuff, but I still couldn’t pull up a killer example of how powerful this “social” thing really is. But today I found it:

Digg Swarm

Digg Swarm shows you people “Digging” stuff - real-time - and shows the relationships between the things people are digging. Aside from the mesmerizing graphical representation – Swarm shows us what is really happening in the social tagging community…and it is pretty amazing.

Now when I showed this to my boss he asked me – “why are all of these people doing this?” (My boss is an accountant by trade – show me the money, etc.) The amazing thing is the only reason I could give him that was not metaphysical Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo was that it helps people keep track of things they like. Not that I think that really has much to do with why people are digging away at an amazing rate.

To me, it seems like people are out there digging to be a part of something bigger than themselves. To join a club. To make their opinion heard. To help share information in a way that you can’t with a search engine. To create, as a group, a new Internet built on the passions of the Internet’s most passionate users.

And that, folks, is the shit.

So I think I found my example of how/why I think the blogging/social search/viral world is going to survive and continue to grow.

What do you think? Is this social search thing for real, or will it be the next big bust? And if you are a Digg user, why do you Digg?