Social Bookmarking 101

You may have noticed the recent addition of link icons to Green Bay Net news stories and announcements. You may have also noticed the same links appearing on other popular web pages such as CNN (at the bottom of the story, click on "Share"), BBC, About.com (at the bottom of the article, there is a plain-text link for Digg) and many, many others. Those small links are part of a growing trend on the Internet called social bookmarking.

Although still relatively new, social bookmarking is an important concept to understand for any business with a website or any Internet user who wants to get the most out of their connection.
As you may or not be aware, everyone is part of a demographic. Yes, even you! Advertisers and Marketing experts have used this information to determine your likelihood of buying certain products, enjoying certain television shows, or picking up tickets to the theater for years.

Social bookmarking is essentially demographics turned upside down. Social bookmarking is based around people who share similar demographic and/or interests, sharing with other people of the same “category” of what they find important or useful. Social bookmarking has become more and more popular.

Del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") was one of the first social bookmarking sites founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and was later bought by Yahoo in 2005. Since then, many new social bookmarking sites have been launched and continue to enjoy an ever growing user base. Such sites include, but are not limited to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Blue Dot, BookmarkSync, Cloudytags.com, Diigo, Furl, GiveALink.org, Ma.gnolia, My Web, Newsvine, Propeller.com, Reddit, Simpy, and Thoof.

The growth of social bookmarking is connected to several other key changes in the way that people access information online, as well as fundamental shifts in the way that websites are developed and presented. Although this article is unable to cover all the changes that have taken place over the past few years, there are several changes and trends that are generally agreed upon to be large contributing factors to the growth of social bookmarking.

The development of Web 2.0 is one of these trends. Web 2.0 is a concept that is generally attached with the concept of social bookmarking. Web 2.0 represents a focus on user driven content and a streamlined user interface. Currently web 2.0 is also highly connected with modern web design techniques such as CSS and AJAX.
This new focus on being user driven lends itself to the core idea of social bookmarking.

Currently, the most popular way to find information is to “Google it”, in which Google or one of the other search engines runs your search query basically through a very long math formula and then displays results based on what the math formula says you are most likely looking for.

Social bookmarking allows users to break from this model of mathematical categorization in favor of organic categorization. More discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of mathematical categorization vs organic categorization will be discussed in a later article.

If you are interested in hearing more about social bookmarking or Web 2.0 features, or are interested in incorporating some of these ideas into your site, please call 1-888-314-4638 to schedule a one on one consultation with one of our genius website consultants.