What is Social Bookmarking?
Posted on December 1, 2009
Filed Under Social Media | Leave a Comment
Social bookmarking is something that I’ve been aware of for ages now but haven’t really been interested enough to find out about and certainly not interested enough to use, until recently. According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a “method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources.” Still not sure what it is? You’ve almost certainly seen evidence of it already, see the image below from the BBC website.
Common Use of Social Bookmarking
You probably use the ‘My Favourites’ in your web browser to store your favourite web links but have you ever been at work or at a meeting in someone’s office or even at a friends house and wanted to show them a great website / article / video you came across the other day. You can’t because it’s recorded on your home computer. Well social bookmarking is basically an online ‘My Favourites’ that you can access wherever you go rather than being restricted to where your computer goes.
It’s a bit more than this though, it’s a social media tool as well, allowing you to share things you like with other people and seeing what they are highlighting as interesting, funny or useful. It’s also another good way of finding quality information, as only good articles will get ‘hit’ by multiple users so you can often tell at first glance whether an article has been widely read and appreciated judging by the number of ‘Diggs’ it may have had.
It’s also a useful search engine optimisation tool and you should get into the habit of registering every new article you publish and you can even add the badges below your article which allows people to quickly add their vote to your article if they like it. You can see at the foot of this post that I’ve added a Digg and a re-tweet badge (feel free to click them!).
If you want an in-depth guide to best practice for social bookmarking then try this beginners guide to social bookmarking.
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