Automated Social Bookmarking

Before you embrace automated social bookmarking applications, you may want to think about whether they are actually a web 2.0 form of social media spam.

Social bookmarking is an integral part of the new "web of conversations" going on every day on the Internet. In some ways it's an offshoot of the way that Google and other search engines rank sites – that is, the more people that go to a site, the more useful the search engine thinks it is, so that means it will appear higher on the results.

Social bookmarking takes this into the realm of human interaction. Digg, for example, is one of the most popular bookmarking site. The way it works is simple: if you like a site, you post it to Digg. Other people see the site, and if they Digg, it too you get higher rankings. The idea is that if someone liked a site to take the time to actually digg it, it has some credibility.

Another form of bookmarking is Del.icio.us. This one relies more on common interests and tags, where people will each have their own del.icio.us account and add interesting bookmarks. While these do appear on the Delicious.com home page, complete with ranks similar to Digg, it's also common for people to follow individuals' "delicious page" which shows all the bookmarks they've found interesting. Like many social bookmarking sites, these pages have RSS feeds that allow people to follow multiple accounts.

There are dozens of social bookmarking sites out there, from the big dogs like Digg to smaller newcomers like Scuttle. Every time a site is listed on one of their members' sites, it stands a chance of being picked up and put on other sites, and that means that a popular link can go from a single submission on Digg to thousands or millions of links permeating the web. When this happens, it is called "going viral" since the link spreads around the Internet like a virus.

If a link goes viral – if that many people find a site interesting – it has very positive results for the search rankings. And that's where automated social bookmarking tools take aim and threaten, at times, to ruin the whole system.

The theory behind the bookmarking automation is that is saves time. "Who has time to submit to all the social bookmarking sites?" is the gist of most of the ads. "Use our software, and we'll automatically send every entry or link or page to hundreds of social bookmarking pages!" While it's true this would spread your pages to many different sites, some software won't stop there – it will look for other people's pages that can be added on (for example, Scuttle accounts) and put your link there as well.

All of this is great for linkage, but not so good for the idea that the social web is made up of people. These automated programs – usually just some PHP code that sits on your web server – put your link on people's pages regardless of whether it's actually relevant to their interests, or whether someone actually visited your page and liked it. As a result, it begins to call into question some of the rankings on the trusted sites. That leads to the whole system beginning to fail, in much the same way that keywords and metatags stopped working so well due to the misuse of popular tags like "sex" on many websites.

However, it is true that submitting a link you do like to all the social bookmarking sites can be time consuming. Some applications have begun to tie into each other – Posterous, for example, can forward your entries and pictures to other sites such as Twitter and Facebook. There are also sites such as OnlyWire which seem to be a happy medium – they will automatically submit to multiple sites, but only in accounts you have already set up.

This keeps the "social" in social media – you have the responsibility to reach your audience not based on tricky code, but on good content.

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