The latest buzzword for success is Pligg but what exactly is it? Pligg is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that users can use for free. With Pligg, visitors can register at your website to submit content and connect with other participants. Pligg makes it easy to add social networking to your website.

In mere minutes, you can start your won social networking community with Pligg web hosting. Pligg began as a basic CMS for users to submit and vote on news articles. This is still the basic premise of Pligg. Users votes on stories of interest and the articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of your Pligg hosted website. Voting is a simple 5 star process much like Reddit or Digg.

Your website will become populated quickly with Pligg social publishing. Pligg hosted websites can manage an unlimited number of authors so participation is limitless. Registered users of your website are actually controlling its content. The success of a Pligg hosted website is driven by its users and their content and participation. Everyday something different and exciting will appear on an active Plig social network.

Another benefit of Pligg is the ability to create groups. Special interest groups are created for people to share common interests about certain topics. Groups may have open membership or membership approval might be required.

When you have Pligg social networking, users have a variety of ways to communicate with each other including:

• private messaging so friends can send messages and respond right away to keep communicatino strong;
• advanced comments so people can comment on articles as well as rate them to share opinions freely and openly; and
• unique user profiles where you send personal messages, add an avatar, make friends and more to personalize the social networking experience.

Pligg is also user-friendly with a module system that makes it possible to change your site without altering Pligg code. Smarty templates make it a breeze to design new templates and update your site to the latest version of Pligg. No core files need to be edited so upgrading is quick and easy. It's simple to include RSS feeds to automatically add more stories and news to your site.

Your website with Pligg hosting also attracts more traffic thanks to SEO methods. Because Pligg is search engine friendly, you'll appreciate more targeted traffic by having your site indexed quicker and more often. Pligg is also designed for users to choose a language during the first installation step. More languages will be added to future versions of Pligg to make social networking even more extensive.

Social networking is the hottest online activity today. Millions of people are communicating about their needs, wants, preferences and thoughts through social networks. If you don't get in on the action, you miss a golden opportunity to drive more traffic to your website. Pligg web hosting gives you the chance to create a social network for a more successful website with greater profits.

About the author David Tanguay David is the owner of Interactive Online, a web hosting service provider. He specializes in hosting and designing websites built using open source software and contributes to the Joomla, Drupal and WordPress projects.