What is Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is one of the flagships of Web 2.0.
The basic concept behind social bookmarking is that when
thousands of people get together, bookmark their favorite
pages, and apply descriptive tags to each page that they
bookmark, certain websites will rise to the top as being more
popular. The result of this is that surfers will be able to see
what websites are currently popular among users.
The idea of social bookmarking seems to have been originated by
Del.icio.us back in 2003. Just by visiting the front page of
Del.icio.us you can see the social bookmarking in practice. On
the right hand side of the page there is a column labeled
'Popular'. These are websites that currently are receiving a
lot of attention from users under specific keywords and
phrases. These websites are listed under common 'tags' that
users have given.
Wikipedia gives a fairly good explanation of social
bookmarking. You can find that explanation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking.
You can also goto Del.icio.us and try out the service which
is a great way to learn about social bookmarking
Digging for the News
Del.icio.us is not the only Web 2.0 flagship that relies on
the power of the collective people. Arguably one of the most
successful Web 2.0 enterprises is Digg. Digg is a news website
which presents headlines from across the Internet. Unlike
practically every other news website to date, however, Digg
does not rely on editors to determine which news stories are
worthy of their front page and which news stories they should
ignore. Rather, Digg relies on the input of their users.
The system behind Digg is simple. Registered users can
navigate their way to "Digg for Stories". Here everyone can see
all of the stories submitted to Digg. If a user likes one of
the stories, they simply clïck on the "Digg It" link. If they
do not like the story they can either ignore the story or
report it as being lame, a duplicate story, or outright sp@m.
If a story receives enough Diggs in a fast enough amount of
time, it gets promoted to the front page.
The system seems to work fairly well. Digg has been smart
enough to put into place anti-cheating devices which do a
fairly good job of catching manipulators of their system. And
if someone does break through these barriers, Digg users (often
referred to as Diggnation) are usually pretty quick to point
out the offending users.
Why Should I Care?
This is all fine and interesting, but you might be
wondering why you should spend your precious time reading more
of this article. The answer is simple: websites like Digg and
Del.icio.us represent the opportunïty to get a lot of new
traffïc as well as quality links to your website.
Digg and Del.icio.us offer the absolute best type of web
traffïc: viral traffïc. Business owners know that the most
reliable prospects are the prospects that come from the
referral of someone else, and Digg and Del.icio.us offer just
that. In order to get seen on a large scale from any of these
websites that rely on a community of users, your content must
be good enough to meet the approval of enough people to warrant
the elevation of your site to the front page. This, in effect,
is like one great recommendation for your website.
So how much traffïc are we talking about? Darren Rowse of
ProBlogger.net noted that when a post of his reached the front
page of Del.icio.us, he saw around 8,000 visitors that day from
Del.icio.us alone. This does not take into account all the
bloggers and website owners who discovered his site from
Del.icio.us, posted a link to it on their site or in a forum,
which would in turn generate more traffïc to his site.
Tech-Recipes, a relatively common website on the front page of
Digg, wrote a great post on what the digg effect is like. The
traffïc numbers they post are quite astounding. From being
featured in Digg, they regularly see 5,000 – 10,000 visitors
per day. This is not unusual either – websites that are
featured in Digg are often subject to what has been dubbed the
"Digg Effect". It is quite common, unfortunately, for a dug
website to receive so much traffïc that it brings down the
server.
Nöw both Del.icio.us and Digg users do not tend to be very
active users. This has been pointed out by more than one
person. Typically they do not clïck on ads, they do not comment
on blogs, and they do not register for an account with you. But
the name of the website marketing game is always going to be
frëe exposure, and social bookmarking services like these are
great ways to get a lot of frëe exposure for your website. In
addition, these sites will often have secondary and tertiary
effects which you may not be able to link back directly to your
initial exposure on them.
The point of the article which I referenced above was not to
state that Yahoo was washed up, but rather that Yahoo was on
the cusp of a new Internet and a new förm of search. They
recognized that Google would not be beat in the search market;
however, this does not mean that they can not beat Google by
creating a market more effective than search.
Social bookmarking is already becoming a very effective way
for experienced web surfers to find the latest information on a
particular subject. Do you want to see some of the latest
videos to become popular? Just goto http://del.icio.us/tags/video and you
can see what others are discovering and bookmarking as
valuable. Want to find some rather obscure guide on Ruby on
Rails? Lookup the common tags for Ruby on Rails and search
through these resources.
Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search
engines cannot: by using viral marketing and popular opinion,
social bookmarking has the ability to discover what is
important before any bot can spider the site and rank it among
the thousands of sites available. Granted, social bookmarking
will nevër replace search completely, but as it grows in
popularity, web users are quickly discovering a whole new way
to discover web pages that they would nevër discover
otherwise.
So take the time today to examine Digg and Del.icio.us. Take a
little more time to find new social websites like Digg and
Del.icio.us (they are popping up all over the place) and learn
what seems to make users on these sites clïck. Social
technologies are here to stay, and they are only going to grow
in popularity. Right nöw is a golden opportunïty for you to
gain great exposure for your website if you simply learn how to
use these services.
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