Social Bookmarking – What Is it and Who Are the Key Players?

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to manage, organize, archive, and search for bookmarks online resources. Social bookmarking is important because it allows you to leverage your content. If the content is used properly, other things will follow.

It has several benefits, including the exposure of your content on other websites, which will give you a higher degree of visibility, and an ability to acquire a back link with keyword relevance from a website of authority. If you are marketing your products and services in your niche, this is a good source of your revenue. The more you can share information about your brand with people online, the stronger your reputation and credibility will become.

Lately, many search engine optimization (SEO) companies are depending greatly on social bookmarking submission to promote their clients' websites. High-quality social bookmarking creates good-quality back links and draws a large amount of traffic.

In social bookmarking, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. The bookmarks are generally public and can be saved privately, are shared only with specific people or groups and are only inside certain networks, or in another combination of public and private domains. The people who have access can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other people. The following is a partial list of popular social bookmarking sites:

• Delicious: (originally called del.icio.us) invented tagging and coined the term social bookmarking. It is a web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private. Imported bookmarks are private by default.
   
• Furl: A free service that maintains important items that you find on the web and allows you to find them quickly again.
   
• Simpy: A web-based personal and bookmarking service, which was acquired by Yahoo! but still operates independently.
   
• Citeulike: A free online service that organizes references to academic papers and can be shared with others.
   
• Connotea: A free online reference management service for clinicians, researchers and scientists. Connotea is sometimes called a social citation service.
   
• Digg: A social news website. The site's cornerstone function consists of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Many stories get submitted every day but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.
   
• Diigo: Diigo allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag webpages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo or a special link forwarded to someone else. The name "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.”
   
• StumbleUpon: An Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate random web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine that uses peer and social-networking principles. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the "Stumble!" button on the browser's toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user's ratings of previous pages, ratings by his or her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
   
• Connectbeam: A social bookmarking and tagging service targeted toward businesses and enterprises
   
• Lotus Connections: A product that is owned by IBM. It is social software for business. The product provides businesses of varying sizes with a Web 2.0 collaborative work environment.
   
• Sites such as reddit and Newsvine offer a similar system for organization of social news.

Advantages

A social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional, automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as websites) is done by humans who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to identify the meaning of a resource.

Additionally, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. Moreover, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it (although both types of ranking are susceptible to fraud and both require technical countermeasures to try to deal with this).

Disadvantages

Informal vocabularies

When it comes to search data, there:

• Are drawbacks to tag-based systems
• Is no standard set of keywords
• Is no standard for the structure of such tags (eg, singular vs plural, capitalization),
• Is mistagging due to spelling errors
• Are tags that can possibly be ambiguous, which can appear often
• Are unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion
• Is no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags

Spam and corruption

Social bookmarking can also be vulnerable to corruption and collusion. Because of its popularity, some people think of it as a tool to use along with search engine optimization to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better the chance it has of being found. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page several times and/or tagging each page of their website using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking is an important way to organize resources and to make sure that those resources that are important to you are always at your fingertips. It is advantageous that there are several bookmarking options from which to choose and it is important to carefully choose the bookmarking site that is the most appropriate for you and your business and the one that gives you exactly what you need to grow your business and become more and more successful over time.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.