There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites. What is the purpose or use of these sites to me was a mystery. Here is what I found out.The original or traditional social bookmarking sites were and still are used to bookmark our favorite websites. Our browsers have a spot that we can save our favorites but we can only access them from that computer, with a spot online we can access them from any computer.What are the advantages of Social bookmarking?We can store, organize, search and manage bookmarks, then we can access these from any internet connection no matter where we are in the world.
These sites are browser independent, so you can get into your account from any browser on any computer.
These sites allow you to share bookmarks with anyone that has an account.
Most importantly It provides a way for you to tell people about your website and build one way links to your site.Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are: Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Reddit. I found there is a difference between Social Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook – that might be for another discussion.Why do we want to use Social bookmarking sites?Social bookmarking does now has and it continues to grow, a wide user base.
Teenagers and younger internet users like it because it does such a great job of bringing them current, relevant content without having to really go out and track it down online.
It is a way to find and organize online content – It is a way that you can go to a site recommended by a real person rather than a search engine.
They are finding that web marketers are using social bookmarking sites more and more. When it is used in a way that makes them effective they are finding many marketing benefits. Some think that this is just the beginning of this wave.The biggest question that I had is, how does Social Bookmarking work? I found I needed to find this out a before I could really make it work.Tags are important in social bookmarking. The bookmarks are organized by keywords or tags that you place on your bookmarks. Tags “allow you to provide a quick and efficient way to categorize your bookmarks” You create the tags and put as many in your bookmark as you like. I was told that Tags form the foundation of a social bookmarking site.
Everyone knows when the go the site who created each bookmark and then you have access to that person’s other bookmarked resources. This allows you to make social connections with people that are interested in the same topics you are. The you can discuss, rate and vote on the content.
This was one of two new words to me that I was told was a concept that I needed to understand about Social Bookmarking. The first word was Taxonomy: it is a set of words that classifies or categorizes a system. This classifying of sites within the system, into a directory for searching purposes is usually done by internet professionals.
The second word was Folksonomy: through the process of multiple people setting up bookmarks to a given URL and assigning their own tags to describe it, a whole set of keywords describing the site begins to take shape. Thru public opinion or communities a taxonomy develops as dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people come to a social bookmarking sites and enter a tag for a specific website or webpage. The advantage they say of the folksonomy is it provides a democratic tagging system that reflects the opinions of the general public. Some other words you may here to describe this are collaborative tagging, social classification, and social tagging.
I wondered why on some of the social bookmarking sites like delicious these squares with words came up some words larger and some smaller came up. This is called a Tag Cloud. These are a visual way to see the foklsonomy. The larger the font the more popular the tag word is, you can then click a tag in the tag cloud to see the latest bookmarks saved with that tag.Well I think that is enough to absorb for today in a couple of days we will talk about some of the things we need to do to make social bookmarking work for us.