Social bookmarking sites are websites where Internet users share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. The best way to explain is to start with a good analogy.
You want to watch a good horror film in the cinema.
Do you?
- Randomly pick a movie (based maybe on the movie title or the actors within); or
- Read some reviews / ask a friend who already likes horror films?
What's a movie?
I’m guessing most of you either read movie reviews or ask a friend for a recommendation.
Guess what? Social bookmarking is the 21st century internet equivalent of reading reviews or getting recommendations from a friend. When trying to find websites, videos or songs you like, you utilize the wisdom of the crowds online to find stuff you’ll like.
A video is worth 1000 pesetas
Social bookmarking helps you organize all your favourite sites
Say you find a cool site. Usually you promise yourself you’ll remember it and come back to it in future, but the fact of the matter is that you probably won’t. If you’ve got too much time on your hands you might bookmark the website in your browser. But bookmarks stored this way are a pain to organize (requiring folders) and have little permanence (since if you upgrade your computer they are going to go away).
There is a solution to this mess. You can start using something called delicious. You install delicious into your web browser and from then on every time you favourite a site delicious asks you to tag it. So, say you find a website with lots of great DJ mixes. You then tag it as “mixes”. That way, if you’re trying to find the mixes sites you’ve been to in the past you don’t have to root through all your bookmarks – all you do now is just click the “mixes” tag, and all the sites you tagged this way will appear.
Tag Clouds - 21st century organisation
Already delicious is sounding pretty damn good for organization…. but thats not all it can do. You can also apply multiple tags to a single site. For example if the DJ mixes site mentioned above specialized in terrorcore, you also tag it “terrorcore”. That way it would appear both in the mixes and terrorcore tags page. Not only this, but you can now search your delicious tags to find only pages which have multiple tags – e.g. looking only for sites tagged both terrorcore and mixes – the overlap of the two.
Because everything is so organized and easy, delicious encourages you to bookmark far more than you would otherwise, and you soon build up a great set of online resources.
Social bookmarking helps you find new useful or fun new websites
Social bookmarking websites give you lots of ways to discover new websites.
On Digg or Delicious you can see what’s popular and find out what’s all the rage on the net right now. You can choose whether to be present with recent hits or find out what’s the most popular site or resource of all time, helping you catch up on missed internetz. Very good for keeping on top of things/
On some social bookmarking sites like delicious you can search for a particular tag (such as “cats”) and the results will show sites which other users have tagged with “cats”, exposing you to lots of highly recommended, highly relevant cat sites. Better yet you can hone your search down by adding more tags. From the “cats” results you can filter by adding more cats. I added “funny” to the mix and found this guide to telling whether your cat if trying to kill you. I’d check out the link cuz it’s pretty damn funny and pretty damn catty.
On nearly all social bookmarking sites you can make friends with other users of the site, similar how you might on Youtube or (less similarly) on Facebook. This allows you to see what sites they have tagged or recommended. These friends could be your real world friends, your co-workers or just like minds on the internet (“friends”). By utilizing their recommendations you can find lots of great stuff you would have otherwise missed.
Social bookmarking sites is the aspirin to your boredom
The internet: curing boredom since 1994
Bored? Then visit Digg or Reddit and check out all the sites listed on the front page. Because thousands of people have already recommended the sites on Digg or Reddit’s front page, the likelihood is that these sites are pretty good – at least from a populist point of view.
Social bookmarking helps site owners (like me) become more popular
How couldn't you help me out?
By clicking clicking on the Tweet This, Digg, Stumble or Delicious buttons on each of our individual posts, we get tagged in a social bookmarking website. If we are already tagged, then we get an extra vote. More votes means we rank higher on these websites and we will receive more traffic and more readers. Some of these readers might in turn bookmark us too, starting an ever increasing cycle of increasing traffic. Perhaps to your surprise, I’d quite like this to happen.
If you like an article on our website then please click the buttons, it takes two seconds and you really are helping me out.
Hell, in the long term our success is good for you too. With higher traffic we’d have the resources to make the site better, produce higher quality content and do all sorts of great things for you our beloved (and likely gorgeous) readers. With that in mind, why not go on and socially bookmark your favourite articles on this site?
OK I know what Delicious is. What are the others all about?
TBC
Stumbleupon
Stumbleupon adds a button to your browser called “Stumble”. This brings you to a random website. But it’s actually not that random. Stumble upon asks you for your interests initially and filters sites with these in mind. In addition stumbleupon asks you to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” every site you stumble, and use this information to learn what you like and don’t like, thus increasing the chances that you’ll enjoy future stumbles
Their website video explains very well
Mass Social Bookmarking
At the press of a button.
