Since when did sitting in front of the computer become social? I was warned when i was younger that these anti-social tendencies of playing Warcraft til 2am, would not develop my skills to act socially. Well now the social sphere came to Warcraft, and who's laughing now. The social sphere of teh web has encapsulated all of us and we are really stuck in the biggest mindfield of information with no idea where to find the best information. So our friends at google, yahoo and warcraft created a platform by which to share this information. Google used Pagerank to outsource the best web content on a specific subject. Now this would usually yield you the same results over and over again. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. But with a new type of sporadic search was taking place. Getting information from your social networks is one of the oldest forms of word of mouth, but now its copying a link and pasting it to your friend.Social bookmarking has made it easier for us to do all these things. We can share all our links from tiny little buttons that appear on most pages now. This viral marketing is giving Google and other search engines a bit of a tough time, because in the not too distant future we will have a large enough social library of trustworthy links to not need the Google bot anymore. This however must be decades away, or maybe not. Social bookmarking is a medium for web surfers to share, organize, search, and archive bookmarks of websites. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Sharing a link cannot be pirated as they will go to that owners website and use their info.
The process of creating your library of links will require more than just a longtail url. There is no point in have a mass database of just those, so when you are bookmarking socially the engine you are using will ask for Tags, or Meta Descriptions, these are added to the bookmarks so that other users may understand the content of the link without first needing to browse it. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. Lets get down to the real examples of what is out there for us surfers to use. A few of my favourites are: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Gather. Social bookmarking makes surfing the web fun when you can share entertainment and information with people in your network about what is going on in our world today.
Digg will list your links and sites with a nice description and an image once you are signed up. The site encourages you to spread the word an invite all your friends from your social networks. This helps a great deal in spreading the site or any link you find interesting or cool. The other websites use a similar method to add and share your links through social networks.
The outcome is a huge variety of searchable links that also add to your websites Pagerank. This will help the SEO's of the world push their websites up the Google rankings. These tools have become a natural organic way of spreading links through users instead of Google making them high traffic zones.
Social Bookmarking Pro's and Cons
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High PageRank Sites |
Difficult to start |
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Easy to start |
Hard to maintain |
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Increase Your Web Presence |
Time Consuming |
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Good for SEO |
Hard to measure Return |
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Online Bookmarking |
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Good Long Term Benefits |
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Networking Potential |
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Tagging |
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The tools are here to make things easier for people to find and for the bots to index. We have the formula now we are using real people to manipulate the statistics on whether information is graded or passed on by our peers. Let us watch as the peer based search becomes realtime organic results.
