Social Bookmarking Sites

Just as a bookmark helps you keep your place in a print book, social bookmarking sites help you store Internet information.

Social bookmarking is also known as tagging. It is one of the many open source networking tools on the Internet. You have probably used some form of bookmarking on your web browser. When you discover a site whose information you find valuable, you might categorize it and add it to your list of bookmarks.

Social bookmarking takes this one step further. It allows you take the website and store it on social bookmarking sites, which can be shared with your friends. Additionally, social bookmarking sites allow you to view the websites that your friends have bookmarked. Like your personal bookmarks, social bookmarks are arranged by category. This makes it easier to find similar sites that might be of interest to you.

Social bookmarking has many benefits for anyone with a commercial website. By submitting your web page to a bookmarking site, it has a much better chance of being picked up by the search engines. This is a perfect way to increase traffic to your website. Some business owners actually use social bookmarking software as a means of submitting their pages to bookmarking sites.

While there are many bookmarking sites in cyberspace, some are more effective than others. Here are some of the more popular sites.

Digg is interesting because it combines social bookmarking with social networking by allowing readers can comment on articles and vote on their quality. If you are lucky enough to have your site pushed to the front page of Digg, you will be rewarded with an increased amount of traffic.

Stumble Upon is similar to Digg, in that users can give you either a thumbs up or a thumbs down rating. However, you need to be careful about how many times you submit the same site. Some users have been banned for doing this. Make sure to occasionally submit websites other than your own.

Del.icio.us was actually the first social bookmarking site. It was recently purchased by Yahoo, which has significantly increased its popularity. The site allows you to download a bookmarklet to your browser, so that you can easily tag the sites that interest you. Your links will be displayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, the most recent site that you added will be at the top of your page.

Technorati is a social bookmarking website whose major focus is media-related topics. As such, it's an excellent site for bookmarking photos, videos and audio files. Some of its unique features include the Popular page, which updates recent submissions to the site, as well as popular websites on the reviewed by users. Contrary to what you might think, the Technorati WTF page actually stands for "where's the fire?" It allows users to justify the popularity and importance of the pages that they submit. The Technorati community then votes on the effectiveness of the explanation.

In order to be truly effective, a social networking website should have the following essential features:

• A large number of users
• Documentation, such as a "help" page and a FAQ to assist users
• Import and export capabilities, so that you can import bookmarks from your web browser and export bookmarks if you decide to change to another social bookmarking website
• A blog with updates about site bugs, maintenance schedule and new features.

• Safe Facebook Applications
• How Do I Make a Podcast
• Blogging the Bible

• Facebook Login Problems
• Facebook Sign In
• Free Lesbian Chat Rooms
• Best Facebook Proxy Sites
• Funny Facebook Status

• Social Bookmarking Software
• Security Issues with Social Networking Websites
• Open Source Social Bookmark
• What is Electronic Social Networking
• Social Networking Boom