Social Bookmarking: The Newbie's Whirlwind Tour

And I thought I was slick for switching over to Google Bookmarks back a few months ago. Little did I know how far behind the times I was. Thanks to watching a short video that I'll embed in this hub, I got a good explanation of what social bookmarking is all about. The best way to explain this, from my point of view, is to go through the steps that I went through in my relationship to bookmarking.

1. Paper bookmarking. Writing down the names of my favorite web sites on paper. This phase didn't last long, obviously.

2. Local bookmarking. Using the bookmarking feature in the web browser to store the locations of frequently-visited web sites. This is quick and easy to do, but has several drawbacks. Mainly, if you need to access your bookmarks from a different computer, you can't. If you use two different computers, you will have two different sets of bookmarks. If you want to share a link with someone, you do it by e-mailing it to them. If your computer crashes, you lose all of your bookmarks (unless you backed them up).

3. Remote bookmarking. My example of this is Google Bookmarks. It's an improvement over #2, because it solves the issue of accessing bookmarks from another computer, and it also removes the need to back up bookmarks since they're stored outside of your computer. But this service does not include any kind of social bookmarking capability. It also allows only one tag per bookmark, just like local bookmarking.
4. Social bookmarking. In our example, we'll use del.icio.us. Here, you install a toolbar to your browser, and "tag" any web site that you would like to keep track of. You can now stick any number of labels on each bookmarked site to keep track of which sites are good for what. Also, your friends can see which sites you bookmarked.

As I'm fairly new to this concept, I'm sure that there is a lot more depth to be explored here. But I thought I would put this out there to give anyone a quick "skinny" on social bookmarking who is as clueless as I was on the subject up until earlier today.

One last note: I found during my research that socially bookmarked web sites are more likely to show up on the search engines than sites that are not bookmarked. I'm not sure to what extent social bookmarking affects search engine rankings, but I do know that the spiders take into account how many links externally reference a web site. Google, particularly, takes into account how relevant the referring site is. It seems likely that high numbers of users bookmarking the same site would be likely to increase its ranking, and less than that would make little difference.

Not to say that the Internet wasn't democratic before, but social bookmarking is about to change things again. What it really boils down to is simple. Anyone can bookmark a site on StumbleUpon and give it a review. They can thumbs-up it or thumbs-down it. StumbleUpon keeps track of this, as well as the category the user put the bookmark in. Fast forward to when somebody else signs up with their service. The new user designates "channels" or categories of web sites that they're interested in finding out about. They have five minutes to kill and click the "Stumble All" button, and are directed to a randomly-selected web site that was previously rated by another user and placed in a category that they expressed interest in seeing. They can now give it another vote. I would assume (though I haven't verified) that more thumbs-up votes increase the likelihood of the site showing up in "stumbles."

A similar phenomenon happens with del.icio.us, though in this case it's less fancy. A user bookmarks a site on del.icio.us, and their friends are able to see it. Del.icio.us appears not to focused as much on the community aspect as StumbleUpon, as they require you to type in your friends' user names one by one. It seems that they don't encourage building large friend lists just to build large friend lists. Not necessarily a bad thing. But something interesting I noticed about del.icio.us is that I bookmarked a few different sites on their service and found that thousands of other users had bookmarked the same URL's. What's striking about this is that each person who bookmarks a site on del.icio.us is effectively linking to that site and improving its search engine ranking. So imagine what happens when 2,000 users have all bookmarked your site on del.icio.us.

Digg is fairly democratic the same way, though as I mention in my other capsules, it's intended mainly for a narrower niche of web sites. But like the other two, anybody can "Digg" an article. Digg seems to be the most focused on community interaction, since other users can view your profile and see what you Dugg. Then, if they find that you have the same taste as they do, they might start following your Diggs and reading up on the articles you point them to. This can create a snowball effect on the search engines if you build up a large following.

The key to social bookmarking is to use it as a means of telling other people about your favorite web sites. It's also a way of telling the search engines to bump a site up a notch on their list.

Months ago, I started receiving e-mail attachments pointing me to the "StumbleUpon" domain. I didn't get the idea. It sounded to me like a pointless waste of time, most likely devised by some bored college kids at three in the morning while they were smoking pot. But after hearing about it over and over again, I decided to look deeper into it, and lo and behold, it seems to be respected as a social bookmarking site. It seems I was a bit behind the learning curve on this one.

So, based on my half hour of playing around with it, the impression that I've gotten is that StumbleUpon can be used for the following applications:

1. Pointless time-killing web surfing while waiting on hold on the phone or waiting between appointments.
2. Randomly cruising through directory sites (such as blogger.com) to find the best postings that your friends and other community members marked as being worth reading.
3. Finding pretty pictures to look at that you haven't seen before.
4. Finding good videos.

It's a mixed bag, and it's heavily hit or miss. Since this site relies on the opinions of the masses to judge which sites are worth surfing and which ones aren't, we're bound to encounter a good amount of stupidity. My experiments confirmed this. In any case, I did encounter some quality web sites, and some generally neat things to play around with. Most of it wasn't particularly productive, but I don't think it was intended to be. But, it may be that there are better and more effective ways to use this service than the way I've done it. I can't say that I've really given it enough of a chance.

In any case, it comes with a companion toolbar that can be installed into Mozilla Firefox, and I would imagine that there are toolbars for other browsers as well. The nice thing about the toolbar is that any site you happen to encounter during any of your time on the internet can now be marked as "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down." It seems that if everyone makes a point of doing this frequently, it helps the service to work better. In any case, I've scoured the superficial areas of the interface for anything that looks remotely utilitarian, and I have come up bust.

It seems that StumbleUpon includes some sort of adaptive rating system, intended to show you less of the type of material that you give a thumbs-down to, and more of the type that you give a thumbs-up. How well this actually works remains to be seen. I'll find that out as I continue to use the service over the coming weeks.

We'll see how it goes. I'll post updates as I see new things I didn't realize before, possibly in a new hub if I see enough to justify it.

I lot of the same general principles that I mentioned about social bookmarking in general seem to apply to Digg, but this particular site seems to be a bit more specialized than del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. To recap, StumbleUpon seems to cater to the recreational web-surfer, and del.icio.us appears to be an all-purpose bare-bones bookmarking service intended to make it easy to share links with anyone about anything.

Digg, on the other hand, caters to the article format. Digg will allow you to submit a link and identify the link as an article, video, or image. You then can also choose a category for what you submit. The category list is fairly short, and I found that a lot of the things I wanted to submit didn't really fit into any of the category choices that Digg made available. I wasn't sure if what I was submitting wasn't really appropriate, or if their service wasn't really that good. I'm still undecided. I have to reserve judgment on this, due to my own lack of experience and understanding of how it works.

The basic idea that I got from my preliminary exploration of Digg is that it's mainly intended to be used as a rating service for current or recently posted articles on newsworthy topics. It seems to also be a backbone for the new web media in that this sort of filing system may well be a big part of determining what goes viral and what doesn't. The advantage to this sort of rating system is that it gives good ideas a fighting chance, when otherwise they may have gotten buried in the pile.

So, I'm trying to figure out how to make myself useful on Digg. Most of these communities benefit from the frequent participation of their user base, of course, but this begs a new question. What kind of participation really benefits the community, and how should individual users take this into account? It seems like articles with a high number of "diggs" don't really gain anything new by being "dugg" by additional users. It seems like "digging" a really good article that nobody knows about is the best way to benefit this community. Then again, it doesn't cost anything to digg an article.

I can see that it's going to take some time and practice for me to see how these sites really work. I'm going to start by "digging" any article I run across that I would recommend to my friends. I think part of the social aspect to these sites is the fact that people see what kinds of web sites you're marking, and this is another opportunity to easily tell a story about yourself. I'll be interested to see what other ideas fan out from these communities.