Blogging 101: DEL.ICIO.US & Social Bookmarking Explained

Blogging 101: DEL.ICIO.US & Social Bookmarking Explained

by Gobala Krishnan, IAHBE Staff Writer

The World Wide Web’s number one problem is, and always has been, managing information. From early Yahoo-style Web directories to Google and DMOZ (an acronym referring to Open Directory Project, derived from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), people have been scrambling to review, categorize and publish information into forms that make sense. “Social Bookmarking” is nothing more than a new way to do exactly that. In this article we look at the trend of human-managed directories and how it can benefit your business.

History Of Social Bookmarking

Every Web browser comes with a bookmark function. By clicking on “Bookmark” or pressing CTRL+D (on a PC), your browser stores the title and URL of the Website into categorized folders for later viewing. That’s the basics of bookmarking – not too exciting, right?

The next evolution of bookmarking came about when people started to realize a few underutilized concepts of bookmarks:

1) Most bookmarks are computer-dependent – The bookmarks that you store exist on your PC only. If you were to use someone else’s PC, you can’t access those sites that you have bookmarked.

2) You can’t share bookmarks – What if you could share all the best bookmarks you’ve stored with your friends, family or business associates? Wouldn’t it be better (and easier) if bookmarking was done at a higher “community” level?

3) No review & evaluation system – How can you be sure that the sites you have bookmarked are worth your time and attention? How do you easily find great sites that have already been bookmarked by others?

These limitations called for a community-based bookmarking system where you can bookmark a great site independent of your operating system and computer, share it with your friends, and let it be reviewed and approved by others. This phenomenon came to be know as “Social Bookmarking” and it gave birth to a few new massive services like Del.icio.us and tons of smaller yet highly-trafficked “bookmarking sites”

According to Wikipedia.org:

The concept of shared online bookmarking dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, most of this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst. The contemporary concepts of social bookmarking and tagging took root with the launch of the Web site del.icio.us, in September of 2003.

The Advantages & Disadvantages

Although social bookmarking started as an informal collection of personal bookmarks, its significance and ability to generate Website traffic grows rapidly by the day. Here’s why is social bookmarking can be significant to your business blog or Website, according to ConsultantCommons.org:

1) Enables like-minded people to find each other and create new communities of users around a topic.

2) Allows a specific group of people (staff members in an organization for example) to share resources efficiently.

3) Can help you find new insights about a topic by seeing how others think and connect to it.

4) Creates contextual taxonomies (classifications) that have meaning for a particular community/group of people (good for different cultural contexts).

5) Most tools incorporate various mechanisms for sharing information outside of the tools (via RSS, integration with other tools such as blogging software).

As good as it may sound, there are several drawbacks (and some potential hazards) to the social bookmarking phenomenon as well:

1) Tools are still evolving, and not all of these social bookmarking sites have polished, user-friendly interfaces. In fact, some of them may require extensive technical know-how to be useful at all.

2) There is no consistent oversight to how a resource is tagged - e.g. tag London could stand for Julie London, City of London, or Jack London

3) The stream of specific resources on a topic is as good as the community who has joined the service. Some topic are naturally easier to bookmark due to the sheer fact that most of the people interested in it are tech-savvy (for example gadgets) and some are just not.

4) There is the possibility of tagging spam as more online marketers automate the process of bookmarking for easy traffic and fast money.

Bookmarking Gets Del.icio.us

Almost synonymous to the term “social bookmarking”, Del.icio.us is one of the largest online bookmarking service around. You can get your own Del.icio.us account for free by visiting http://del.icio.us/ and setting up your account. When you’re done, Del.icio.us will give you instructions on putting some browser buttons to quickly and easily add pages to Del.icio.us as you’re browsing the Internet.

You now have your own Del.icio.us page, where you can display all your bookmarks for the rest of the world to see.

Every time you click on the “Add to Del.icio.us” button on your browser, you’ll be asked for this additional information:

1) Notes – Description of the URL you just bookmarked. This description will appear on the page that displays your bookmarks, as well higher-tier pages of all the other people who have bookmarked the same URL.

2) Tags – A tags is a keyword that describes the link or URL. Refer to my earlier IAHBE article titled “Blogging 101: Tagging And Technorati Explained” for more information on tags and tagging. In Del.icio.us however, you can only tag single words, so if you’re planning on tagging a URL with the keyword “holiday resort” you need to tag “holiday” and “resort” individually, or tag “holidayresort.”

Now you can add pages easily to Del.icio.us every time you find something interesting. If other people are also bookmarking the exact URL, Del.icio.us will display the bookmark in its main page which hosts its “Hotlist.”

The Del.icio.us “Hotlist” is a list of the hottest bookmarks in the past few hours. Generally, your bookmark should get here if it is also bookmarked by 20 – 50 other people.

How do you tag your bookmarks? Logically you can tag a URL with any keyword you want, but if you’re talking about getting traffic, you have to make sure that your tags will be noticed. Here are the two main approaches to achieving that:

1) Use the most popular tags – On the Del.icio.us hotlist you can see a “cloud” of the most popular tag terms. You can start to bookmark your sites and your own blog using these tag (they have to make sense of course). If you want to avoid stiff competition, go for the second-tier, less popular but equally effective tags. Just make sure the tags you use appear in the cloud.

2) Create your own tag – This is a more challenging route, but can be rewarding. Let’s say that you create a tag called “mynewtag” and on each blog post, you tag your pages in Del.icio.us using this. You also encourage others to tag your blog using the same tag.

As more people tag the same URL with “mynewtag” you start to get a higher tag ranking within Del.icio.us, and more traffic coming your way.

While Del.icio.us may be the biggest social bookmarking site around, there are others worth mentioning. These sites operate almost identical to the way Del.icio.us does, so signing up and using them should be a breeze if you’re already familiar with Del.icio.us.

Creating A “Bookmark Network”

There are two ways you can create your own Del.icio.us network. The first is to get other Del.icio.us users (friends, family and co-workers) to add your Del.icio.us username to their own network, therefore sharing your collection of bookmarks with them. Del.icio.us lets you do this using their “network” tool.

The second is to have multiple Del.icio.us account and interlink each other. You can connect each Del.icio.us account to another by adding it to your network and sharing your bookmarks to create some kind of personal “Bookmark Directory.”

Other Bookmarking Sites

Here are the other big social bookmarking sites:

1) Furl – http://www.furl.net
2) Spurl – http://www.spurl.net/
3) Digg – http://www.digg.com/
4) Blinklist – http://www.blinklist.com/
5) Jots - http://www.jots.com/

Here are some less popular social bookmarking sites (you can expect to see many more in the future):

1) Backflip - http://www.backflip.com
2) Blogmarks- http://www.blogmarks.net
3) Connotea - http://www.connotea.org
4) de.lirio.us – http://www.del.irio.us
5) Feedmarker - http://www.feedmaker.com
6) Frassle – http://www.frassle.net
7) Lookmarks - http://www.lookmarks.com
8) Scuttle - http://www.scuttle.org
9) Unalog – http://www.unalog.com
10) Simpy - http://www.simpy.com
11) Wists – http;//www.wists.com
12) Yahoo! My Web 2.0 - http://myWeb2.search.yahoo.com

Connecting Your Business Blog

Now that you’ve understood social bookmarking, let’s see how you can add this to your blog and get people to bookmark your URL into their own Del.icio.us (or other) accounts. For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to cite Wordpress as a blogging tool, although there are others such as MovableType, LiveJournal, Blogger and more.

One of the most popular tools used for Wordpress is the Sociable plugin, developed by Peter Harkins. This plugin allows you to display most of the popular bookmarking services, although you don’t really need to use them all. Here’s how the Sociable plugin displays the “bookmarklets” as they’re called:

By installing the plugin, the bookmarklets appear on all your blog posts, and users can easier add your posts to their favorite bookmarking services. Another service you can use is Feedburner although it only allows Del.icio.us bookmarking. The advantage of using Feedburner is that you can also display Del.icio.us bookmarklets in your RSS feed, something that Sociable currently does not support.

Managing Expectations & Making It Work

Social bookmarking is no magic pill for Website traffic. You can’t expect overnight results with bookmarking. Instead, expect to see more PageRank (Google’s measure of a Web site’s popularity) and better search engine ranking as a result from getting incoming links from all these high-rated bookmarking service. Even that doesn’t happen overnight, so just keep on bookmarking interesting sites you see while browsing the Internet, and eventually your personal bookmark page on Del.icio.us (and other sites) will start building up its value.

References

1)Consultant Commons, “Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison”

2)Wikipedia.org, “Social Bookmarking”

Gobala Krishnan is a staff writer for the IAHBE and a home based entrepreneur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His company helps frustrated and underpaid employees transform their passion into a profitable home based Internet business. For more info visit http://www.OneDollarCoaching.com.