A Quick Guide to Social Bookmarking
Nov 12
2008
Social bookmarking allows people to share their favorite sites and see what other people think about them. If you’re searching a topic, a social bookmarking site will show you top rated links with commen
ts about why other people liked them. It makes the sites more relevant than a simple Google search.
As you have probably guessed, this can have a strong impact on the traffic of favorite sites. And, you are probably wondering how you can get your site involved and highly rated to partake in this very focused and relevant traffic. Read on…
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is no different from the old practice of saving your favorite web pages to your computer except for the fact that in the new method you make your list of favorite websites public. That’s it. social bookmarking is just a public list of people’s favorite websites.
How to Get Started?
It’s straightforward. All that you need to do is to register with a social bookmarking website (more on this point later) and then you can start storing bookmarks, adding descriptive tags and deciding whether to share your bookmarks with every one or to keep them accessible exclusively for a limited number of people. Web surfers can perform searches based on keywords (or tags), username or popularity, and they can also access other people’s public lists to find what other people have found while searching the same thing they are searching.
How does it Work?
Social bookmarking works in a similar way to libraries in the way that they classify and categorize information. Social bookmarking websites utilize user-created “tags” to organize resources whereas libraries classify books by using proper systems for easy retrieval and archiving. The shortcoming of this classification method lies in the informal tagging performed by users. This is also the strength since tags are basically keywords that you, as the user, assign.
Why is Social Bookmarking Important?
Besides the above mentioned advantages of sharing resources and finding valuable source materials, social bookmarking wears many other hats. For instance, it has been employed in SEO strategies as a way to increase the traffic to websites by building backlinks. It’s also been intertwined with other social media tools. One immediate and important upside is the creation of online communities of like-minded users who share the same perspectives on information and resources. For example, you might tag a web page which displays some video with keywords like “Funny” and “Hilarious”, others may think to the contrary and decide to assign the words “Terrible” and “Lame” to the same video. It’s this democratic approach that makes the sites valuable and interesting.
How to Choose a Social Bookmarking Service?
When Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us) started in 2003, the concept of tagging was novel. Since then, the number of social bookmarking websites grew exponentially and as of today there is a multitude of them to choose from. It’s becoming harder and harder to pick the right service that serve your needs as they all promise the same features. We took charge of analyzing the most popular choices in the world of social bookmarking to give you an overview of the services available. As you will see from the lists linked below, there are quite a few. So, buckle up because we are going for a ride.
Delicious is considered to be the pioneer of the new generation of social bookmarking. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and afterwards it enjoyed a huge success. It’s the ease of use and simplified design that contributed to its popularity. Delicious uses “tags” to organize the content and features a popular bookmarks and tags list on the homepage. It just takes you one minute to enjoy all these features as the signing up process is pretty simple.
Digg is a revolutionary service that makes use of voting and commenting by users to surface the most-interesting news stories or videos. Digg utilizes a simplified categorization system to file the Dugg pages for easy retrieval afterwards. The website also has many facets which correspond to social networking websites such as creating profiles, adding/deleting friends. This networking touch is definitely a plus as it helps in building a large and active community.
StumbleUpon is best described as a discovery and recommendation engine. The term may sound a little bit obscure but that’s the best way to put it in words as it offers its users a new and rich browsing experience. StumbleUpon toolbar is your gateway to this new web adventure; it can be installed on different web browser like IE and FireFox. The most brilliant feature about it, in my opinion, is the high quality search engine integrated with the tool. The search engine crawls StumbleUpon’s database to provide you with the results of long hours work performed by other users.
Furl is an acronym for (File Uniform Resource Locator). It works in the same way as the above mentioned tools but it has one unique feature which is that it makes a copy of every page bookmarked by each user, thus providing the users with an archive of their favorite web pages even if the original content is modified or deleted. It is also equipped with other features like the ability to import/export the saved bookmarks in ZIP format to the corresponding folders in web browsers like IE and FireFox.
Reddit is a social bookmarking website that has virtually the same features as Delicious and Digg. The only noticeable difference is the implementation of an absolute voting system (+1 for hot, -1 for cold). Another feature is the recommended article page which is compiled based solely on the voting pattern by users.
Newsvine is really an interesting and unique site in many ways. It gives a much-needed space for talented writers and journalists to show the world their skills. The website is run by its users and the website administrators are not involved in editing, this decision was left to the users who determine which news story deserves to stay and which one deserves the boot. Users can also post stories from well-respected news sources like the Associated Press and Reuters. They also can benefit financially from Newsvine, a very fabulous differentiator. Newsvine shares 90% of the ad revenues generated on one’s page with that user.
What This Means for You!
Let’s end on a light note, if you are a webmaster don’t attempt to join every service at the same time as this may backfire at you due to the rules stipulated by search engines. For example, Google penalizes websites that receive too many links in a very short time. The best approach would be to go slowly. If you do, you will be rewarded.
One Last Tip
To promote your site’s pages you can give people a reminder and make it easier for them to bookmark your page by adding the bookmaking site’s chicklets, or icons. These show up at the bottom of your posts and when user click on one of the chicklets, it brings up a new window with the specific site in it. You can see it in action on our blog at http://blog.zapbangdone.com/ and on our site at http://zapbangdone.com/.
Here is a link to a good plugin for Wordpress: Social Bookmarking
Here is a link to a good plugin for Joomla: Social Bookmarks
If you have an html site, you can hand code the links. Here is a great list:
Social Bookmark List
As usual, if you need help installing these or would just rather someone else do it, you can call us at 1-800-713-2891.
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