After my article on del.icio.us a number of people have asked for more info on what Social Bookmarking is and what use it has.

Social Bookmarking has only recently become popular after the launch of sites like del.icio.us, digg and simpy. Social Bookmarking is away of organising information on the internet by users “tagging” interesting or important pages.

Wikipedia describes the function:

“In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.”

As you can see this has a number of advantages over conventional search engine spiders, as sites are ranked by Humans rather than computers that judge the quality and relevance of a pages content without the need for complex algorithms.

Probably the best way to take advantage of this is to make it easier for your visitors to submit your great content to the Social Bookmarking engines. You can do this by providing links or icons. To make life easier, you should be able to get a plugin for you blog system.

I’ve recently installed Sociable, a neat little plug-in for Wordpress. It automatically generates icons under my posts allowing visitors to easily submit them to Sociable Bookmarking sites of my choice.
Give some of the icons a click, find a Social Bookmarking site you like and get Tagging!

While your at it why not check out my del.icio.us bookmarks too!

Posted on September 18th, 2006 by Alex
Filed under: Articles, Blogging, General