The Power of Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a way for individuals to save and tag their favorite blogs and Web sites in a public space. The concept is simple, but its power is enormous. What many refer to as “folksonomy” has emerged from social bookmarking sites, providing a taxonomy of the Internet in terms of users.
Instead of allowing search engines to provide us with the “supposedly” best matches for our search terms, we can go to a social bookmarking site, search using those same terms, and find the top sites tagged by users just like us.
You can pull up a site on one of these bookmarking sites and have access to everyone who has tagged your site, and if they have made their bookmarks public, you can even look at all of the other sites those users have tagged. There really is no end to the resources and readers you can access via social bookmarking.
Be sure not to confuse these sites with the not-so-social bookmarking services like Google Bookmarks, My Yahoo! Bookmarks, or Windows Live. They are services that let you save your favorite sites, but they are not “social” because they don’t offer a way for you to share your sites or allow you to search for sites other users have bookmarked.
If you are looking to tap into a tremendous networking and resource-building tool, especially authors and publishers dealing with hot or trendy topics, you should use social bookmarking!
Not only does social bookmarking open up an incredible networking opportunity, it is also really easy to use, usually with just one click. Instead of bookmarking your favorite sites using your browser, you can just add them to your favorites on a social bookmarking site just by clicking a button. You can also tag the sites with keywords that will help you find them later and assign your favorite sites titles and descriptions. If you are planning to use these services for both personal and business reasons, it is a good idea to have a few different accounts. Your business account should only contain sites relevant to your business or you book.
If you’re not sure where to start, del.icio.us is the most popular site for bookmarking regular Web sites, and the most popular site for blogs is Technorati.
Copyright 2008 by Deltina Hay. All rights reserved.
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I didn’t know much about social bookmarking and I learned alot from the article. I’ve been studying on Social Media and I see a lot has changed.