The Wardman Wire

What is Social Bookmarking?

This time I am looking at Social Bookmarking. A really short definition:

Social bookmarks are labels (”tags”) used to indicate articles of interest to others. They are created at websites which act as “noticeboards”.

For a bit more information, read a slightly longer explanation .

Two common features of these sites are:

• They allow you to label an article with your own tag.
• They rank articles or websites according to how many people found it interesting.

Sites may also give different ways to access the information recorded there:

• Popular sites may be listed on the home page.
• RSS feeds may be available for particular tags - for example you could subscribe to “conservative_party”.
• You may monitor the tags of a particular person.

What does it do for me?

If your site is bookmarked - especially on the Digg frontpage - you will receive a lot of traffic *very* quickly. This traffic is fickle, but you may pick up some longer term readers.

More subtly, social bookmarks can be used to manage group projects - to provide a common link across multiple blogs. A good example is the Technorati Tag videobloggingweek2006, used to coordinate a grassroots campaign to promote videoblogging across dozens of blogs.

The audience is also fragmented, so you need to choose your bookmarking site with some care.

Where are Social Bookmarking sites?

There are some very well known sites. Unfortunately, they feature some of the most badly manipulated web addresses on the internet. Three of the top ones (description excerpted from Blog Marketing Tactics :

Digg

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

Every time I see Digg, I think of a video game from my youth called Dig-Dug, which we used to think was fun.

Reddit

Social bookmarking where your votes affect your karma points.

Delicious

Currently the most used software application. But … oh … that web address.

Technorati

Not officially a social bookmarking site, but capable of being used as one.

What do I do next?

If you want to research more social bookmarking sites, then Blog Marketing Tactics have a huge list .

There will be two further parts to this feature, covering how to put social bookmarks on your blog, and how they may be useful for political bloggers. These will be published over tfhe next week,