What's So Delicious About Social Bookmarking?
by Marcia Fortley, Public Relations Manager
Can you Digg It? I always StumbleUpon Delicious Web pages that could really create a Buzz if I could just share my Faves with my Mixx of friends. Huh?
If you read the sentence above closely, six social bookmarking sites have just been identified, and that’s not even the whole kit and Kaboodle…oops seven.
So, what is social bookmarking and why is it so useful, popular, and quite frankly, important?
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks or favorite pages they find on the Internet. In addition to saving the Web page, social bookmarking gives the user the ability to tag the page with keywords that make sense to the user and others searching for the same information.
These saved bookmarks are usually public, or can be saved privately—shared only with specified people, groups, networks or another combination of public and private domains. Those with permission to view the users’ bookmarks can view them chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Most social bookmarking sites encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some sites do feature folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also allow users to view bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking sites also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking sites provide Web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows Web feed subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these sites have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, and groups or other social network features.
What’s the advantage?
A simple advantage is you can access your bookmarked pages on any computer. If you use the bookmarking or favorite feature on Internet browsers, you can find your pages only on the computer you created them on. Not so with social bookmarking. You log on to your social bookmarking site, enter your info/password and presto—there are all your pages, all categorized, and organized by tags that you created.
Another advantage is what “social media” is all about—shared content and content that is recommended by peers. The idea behind social bookmarking is that users have the ability to go to a site (e.g., www.delicious.com, www.digg.com) and do a search on a topic of interest. The search results will be user-generated, user-approved sites and pages that are usually very helpful. Note, usually you do not have to be a signed-up user of the social bookmarking site to search its resources.
With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark Web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by Web spiders. Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.
What should you do?
If you do not have an account with a social bookmarking site – start one! See the list below and investigate which one best suits your needs. Consider putting links to these sites on your Web site. These links will encourage your site visitors to bookmark your site and its content to share and be searched by sources beyond the traditional search engines.
Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites
2) www.digg.com
10) www.mixx.com
12) www.newsvine.com
13) www.fark.com
14) www.slashdot.org
15) www.twine.com
17) www.dzone.com
18) www.faves.com
20) www.diigo.com
