Justin Kistner

Social bookmarking “Found is the new search”

Yeah, so I stole my headline from ma.gnolia. Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking service developed by Zeldman and crew. They are one of about one hundred such services including del.icio.us, reddit, furl, and many more. All of these social bookmarking services offer the ability to save bookmarks to their database and they differ significantly from there. The idea is that if web surfers collectively pool their links into a single database, each surfer can browse that database to find more of the sites they want to see. While there are 100 or so bookmarking services, each one exists because they have different information that is saved along with the link and different methods for browsing links. Let’s take a look at some of the major players.

Popular social bookmarking services

del.icio.us: del.icio.us is one of the most important players in the social bookmarking arena because they are the largest and close to the oldest. Much of the way they organize their links for users to browse is based on tags.
Digg: Digg was revolutionary because they popularized “digging”. Instead of rating a resource from 1 to 5, you either digg the link or you don’t. Then people can tell how valuable a resource is based on the number of diggs it has.
Ma.gnolia: Ma.gnolia take an interesting approach to bookmarks as it treats each entry as though it were a blog post. You can even use ma.gnolia to claim your bookmark blog on Technorati. Ma.gnolia also features communities with moderators that users suggest links to share.
Furl: Furl is an interesting bookmarking service because they will analyze your bookmarks and then make recommendations for other links and other people’s bookmarks.
CiteULike: CiteULike is heavily geared for academia. It’s a pretty standard offering as far as features, but if you are looking to share, store, and organize academic papers, this is the space for you.

Components of social bookmarking

Tags: Tags are a big part of social bookmarking. Tags are keywords or phrases that are assigned to a bookmark for categorization. Bookmarks can be tagged with more than one keyphrase.
Friends and networking: Many of the social bookmarking services allow you to create a profile as well as add people to your network. Other people are great sources for links and I recommend making friends with interesting bookmark mavens.
Link feeds: For the infovore and busy bee sometimes it makes sense to subscribe to link feeds. Say you made a friend on del.icio.us that has the best links and you want to know about them all the time, then subscribe to their links via RSS or ATOM or some other XML feed format.
Bookmarklets: Most social bookmarking services offer the ability to add a link in your bookmark bar in your browser, which you can click to save the current page you’re viewing to save it. Handy little guys.

Hints and tips

If you’d like to use social bookmarking for promotion, here are a couple of suggestions. Pull together a list of links that are related to the links you are trying to promote. For example, if you are trying to promote a car blog, pull together a list of links to popular car blogs, manufacturers, forums, etc. Save them using del.icio.us. Export the list formatted for Internet Explorer. Use that exported list to import your links into the other social bookmark services. This allows you to enter your links into a variety of social bookmark spaces with limited effort. Associating your promotional links with related links helps the social bookmarking services decide to suggest your promotional links to those who have bookmarked the related links. I suggest using popular links for your related links as they will spread your promotional links to more people.

You should also know that many of the social bookmarking services are crawled by search engines. This means that not only do you receive value from having your promotional links in front of the social bookmarking users, but your promotional links also end up in the search engine results. That also means that your promotional links are on pages within the social bookmarking site, which count as inbound links that boosts your site’s search engine rankings. Link feeds are also often crawled by search engines, which again boosts your site’s inbound links and improves search engine position.

If you maintain a blog, I recommend putting shortcut links for people to submit your post to social bookmarking services. I use this technique at the bottom of this post. There are quite a few social bookmarking services, so I recommend using an option menu to house most of them with icons for the most popular services.

Suggest a link

There are sites that aren’t exactly social bookmark services, but they do take site submissions. These include Fark, Slashdot, Newsvine, and BoingBoing. They are great places to submit your links for promotion or if you just find a cool link that should be shared with the world.

Crazy huge list of social bookmarking services

The following are just a few of the social bookmarking services out there. There are close to a hundred, but these are arguably the most popular

Happy bookmarking!

11/08/2006 DIY Webmaster, site traffic, social bookmarking, web presence

Comments

From Mike on November 9th, 2006 at 12:08 am

Hey,

You forgot to look at http://www.BlinkList.com, we are actually one of the major players about 4 times the size of Magnolia. Thought you might like to give it a try.

Mike

From Kyra on November 10th, 2006 at 3:50 pm

I think you should be called “Megafluence” or “God of Influence” – not really. But you are doing some amazing stuff on this site and I love coming here to read your genius. You have a remarkable ability to translate concepts for non-smarty pants like me to understand. Thank you, oh god of web smarts. Your masses thank you.