Thoughts on Social Bookmarking

I recently did a post about blog directories vs. social networking sites. I know that I am always a bit behind the techie trends but I am just now getting into the social bookmarking world which is another layer of these two areas. For those of you that are even a few steps behind me About.com has some really useful howtos on the subject. The above less techie handmade bookmark is from HAWKMANSTUDIOS. It was made with recycled components and is an elegant way to mark your spot.

My first venture into social bookmarking was signing up for delicious. You can view my bookmarks on delicious here. What I like best about this site is that you can view the websites you mark from any computer anywhere. If I mark a site on my home computer but I want to use it the next day at work than I'm out of luck, but if I mark it on delicious than I can access it anywhere. I can also search the site by tags which is a unique method of search unlike any other type of search engine.

You can also share your tags and bookmarks with friends or any like minded folks who like the same stuff you do. You can search for other great websites through tags that people like you have bookmarked. I think that it helps to make the world wide web a more manageable and homey place to visit.

StumbleUpon is another useful social bookmarking site that can also be used for promotion. Everything I've read about sites like delicious say that you should not use it for promotional purposes or you will be considered a spammer. But StumbleUpon and another popular site called Digg are set up a bit differently. Along with the bookmarking capabilities you can submit web pages to the site with a review and they will then be circulated among like minded searchers. You can stumble with a targeted search or just spend a few hours stumbling through interesting sites that have been recommended by fellow users. While doing "research" for this post this morning I got sucked into Stumble and could see myself easily wasting an entire day in its grasp. The more time you spend on Stumble the more street cred you earn so that time could eventually help your promotional efforts.

I read somewhere that for every 5 sites that you submit you should add one of your own pages with the intent of getting all of your content eventually into the system. The more people that stumble your web page the more visibility it will have and hopefully more people will find your content interesting to mark in someway. If you manage to make the front page of Digg or StumbleUpon than you will hit pay dirt in the world of visitors to your site, which could hopefully turn into sales. These sites can also help you build up those all important backlinks that are necessary for SEO.

For bloggers it is important to make your site as easy to mark with the social bookmarking sites as possible. I have recently added the widget from the free site AddThis to the end of each of my posts and in the top of my left column so that people can easily add a page or the entire site to any of the major bookmarking sites. I would love it if you would add whatever content you enjoy to the bookmarking sites you use. This feature makes it easy and fast to bookmark and share any page with the world.