If you’ve got an eagle eye on you, you’ve probably seen websites – including this one - which have little ‘Share’ buttons, where you click it and you’ve got lots of options. It asks if you want to Digg it, Stumbleupon it or Reddit. You’re probably sitting there thinking “What do all these new verbs mean? I thought I was good at English!”. Blame the Internet people for the bad grammar, but they’re vital parts of the World Wide Web. So what exactly is social bookmarking?
The background
With all this Web 2.0 business flying around, we’ve got lots and lots of new content coming in on a daily basis. If we’re still using the old Web 1.0 way of sharing things, we’re not using it to its full potential.
You’ve probably got a bookmark of your favourite news source page, your friend’s blog or the best joke site around in your browser. When you come across one of the 50-odd billion web pages you like, you click ‘Bookmark’ on your browser and save it for later.
That’s great, until you want to show someone it. You go to their house, go to type in the URL for it and, low and behold, you’ve forgotten it. You could just search for it again, but you’re wasting valuable awesome time!
You could email your friend the link, but that can trigger some spam setting and your friend may never even see it. Even if they did, there’s no telling they would actually care about it, and probably get miffed at you clogging up their inbox with your funny picture of a cat stuck in a toilet. You’ve got a dilemma.
You wish there was a place where you could just dump all your favourite links and share them with your friends. Your friends could pick and choose what sort of things you send them to tailor to their interests. Ta-da. The solution is here.
How it works
We’re going to use a social bookmarking site called Digg.com. It’s one of the more popular bookmarking sites, where users ‘Digg’ a good site and it gets rated by how many other people ‘Digg it’. If people don’t like it, they can ‘bury’ it, which essentially means the site isn’t interesting.
Digg.com homepage allows quick access to Diggs
When you visit Digg.com, you’re instantly greeted with the most popular sites on the net recently. If you’re signed in, you can have this personalised to suit your needs. For example, if you like hearing about the latest Tech news, all you need to do is click a tab and it’ll come up for you.
Digg.com allows feedback as well as other ‘Diggs’ to a submitted site
Clicking a story will bring up a screen similar to the one above. It shows a snippet of the content to see if it interests you, a link to the whole site, and a way to give feedback. If you think it’s also a good site, you can digg it by clicking a small button underneath the current number of diggs to the left. The higher the number, the more popular it is.
Comments can be left by readers to discuss the content, say whether it’s useful or not or even just quote their favourite bits. These comments can also be ‘dugg’ to only pick out the most relevant ones.
Submit a link to Digg
To submit a site to be bookmarked, you can do it at home from a plug-in for your browser, or at someone else’s house through the websites site. Digg seems to hide their link, but other’s usually make it big and bold. They want to see what you see.
Then it’s a simple matter of clicking a couple of buttons, typing in a description and you’re ready to go. Your post can be seen by thousands of people. Your friends can see what you’ve found, your neighbours can see what you’ve found but most importantly, you can see what you’ve found.
Advantages over browser favourites
You’ve found a good website. So good you add it to your favourites. But what now? You save it for later, but you’ll forget about it. You thought it was cool, but then realised it’s utterly pointless and forgot you had it. That just amounts to a waste of your time, really, doesn’t it.
You favourite everything remotely funny on the Internet and suddenly your list gets huge. Sorting it by alphabetical order is about as much help as getting to work by space hopper – You know you’ll get there eventually, but it’s a never-ending struggle.
With most social bookmarking sites, adding entries is as easy as adding favourites into your browser. They include a quick reference area where you can find anything you like, along with how popular it is with other people.
You’re also able to tag your entries when you submit them. If you’ve got a website on how to apply to university, for example, you could tag it ‘University’, ‘education’, ‘UCAS’, ‘Entry’, ‘Track’ and other such words. You can then see all pages with these tags and find the sites you want based on this information.
Social bookmarks are browser bookmarks plus one. They allow what you find to be shared amongst likeminded people so they can find their new favourite site. Similarly, you can pop in and see what other people such as yourself are reading and find yourself a favourite site. It’s win win!
Getting your content out there
The main use for social bookmarking for sites, however, is to boost popularity. If you can submit a link to your site to a place where thousands of people will see it a day for free, then nobody would turn that down.
You can post their own webpages to the site, but then it’s a bit artificial. You’re trying to induce a fan base. If you get a member of your audience to do it for you, it shows that your content is ready to go mainstream and you actually have a loyal following – which is a good thing. Honest.
Once someone has put their site on the website, then they can hope people rate it highly. If they do, it gets on more and more people’s screens, and it’s the circle of life. Eventually, you get the top spot on the best social bookmarking site out there, and you’re a recognised brand. Awesome.
Conclusion
Social bookmarking is bookmarking with friends. Instead of just IMing your friend a link to a good site, you can share it with a lot of people all at once. While you’re at it, the owner of the site gets some good publicity, as you’re showing them you love their site.
Feel free to share your bookmarks with whoever you want, rate a few quite highly and see if they love you for it. 
Good post! By the way, I have a collection of 150+ social bookmarking site I often use for my blog. I’d like to share with you all!
http://hy-freeblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/list-of-150-social-bookmarking-site.html
List of 150 Social Bookmarking Sites
Nov 24th at 4:19 pm