Social bookmarking allows you to share your favorite sites with your friends
If you're an avid reader, like myself, you're familiar with marking your place. Oddly enough, this is known as a bookmark. When the internet began picking up steam, browser makers adopted the bookmark concept into their products. For years, people have enjoyed the ability to bookmark their favorite sites and have them one click away at all times. In recent years, as many of you have seen, everything seems to be shifting to a social model; buying, networking and traveling have all gone social. So it should be no surprise that bookmarking has likewise gone social.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had a great site you wanted to share with your friends; Nerdy Werds perhaps? If there were a particular article you enjoyed, you'd either have to tell your friends have to navigate a series of menus, or copy a long address and email it to your friends. This worked, but was a bit limiting. From the standpoint of the website you're linking to, the added traffic is always welcomed. Believe, I sincerely appreciate every link you guys give to me. But how many people will you realistically send that link? I know I would send about two links and then give up. So the question is, how can you spread the word about your favorite site to a longer audience?
Obviously the answer is social bookmarking. A social bookmark is just a link to a site or article that interests you. It's the same as the bookmarks on your browser, but it's available for the world to see. You'll first need to sign up for an account with a social bookmarking site. My favorites are StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. If you're interested, just make your way to one of the links and sign up for an account. Once you've done that, you can begin sharing your favorite sites with your friends and the world.
If you look at the top of the articles on this page, you'll see a long bar of icons. These are sharing links. This puts you one click away from sharing this article with everyone on the internet. Many content based sites, such as this one, will provide these types of links because we want you to share our content. Social bookmarking is a two way street, but we as content producers really want you to help expose our work. The benefit for us site owners is quite obvious.
But this site isn't about me, it really is about you guys. So why should you use social bookmarking? The benefit to you is that social bookmarking is becoming a search engine replacement. Pretend you're interested in finding information about a certain topic, let's say "credit information". If you search that on a social bookmarking site, you'll not only get a wealth of articles, but you can see how many votes and views each site has. Unlike search engines, you see sites based on what people think of them, not what a computer algorithm thinks. This means sites are ranked by popularity, not Page Rank or other computer controlled factors. Social bookmarking sites are starting to challenge search engines for providing useful information. Social bookmarking sites provide the convenience of search engines, with the added benefit of peer reviews.
To me though, the biggest benefit of social bookmarking is the exposure to new and different sites. The internet is riddled with incredible sites and content. People do amazing things on a daily basis, and due to the size of the internet, you may never see it. This is where social bookmarking really shines. People surf the net all the time looking for this new content. When they find it, they tend to bookmark it. So if you want to see this awesome content but don't want to spend hours scouring the web, social bookmarking brings it to you. All you have to do is check out the links people submit.
