Total unique visitors to sites in the social bookmarking space, including all the different niche categories of sites, has grown by more than 70% in the past year and registered nearly 60 million visitors last month. (The niches include the pure social bookmarking sites, the news sites, blog traffic sites, microblogs, and the specialty sites, with shopping as the biggest player in that niche.)

At the bottom of the BuzzMarker.com ranking list, nearly a third of the 125+ social bookmarking sites accounted for posted fewer than 10,000 unique visitors last month. Another way to look at it is that about a third of the sites in the social bookmark space accounted for only 4% of the overall traffic. By comparison, the biggest player (Digg) by itself accounts for more than 40% of all traffic.

So which companies are represented in this last tier of all the sites in the space? Will one of these strike a chord with users, either with their user interface, or their communication technology, and see their own traffic soar? With the recent move by Forbes to purchase bookmarker Clipmarks (they've tripled in size in the past year, BTW), some of the smaller players might be moving onto the radar of the big media companies -- which of these might get snapped up by a major player?

There are over 40 companies in the "under 10k" category, too many to mention in this hub, but here are a few that have been around awhile and are still making progress....or have come on the scene more recently and find their growth accelerating. A few names to "bookmark":

1. Symbaloo (nice home screen interface)
2. Oyax (just the basics, with a frugal home page)
3. Mystickies ("bookmarks on steroids" they say)
4. Mylinkvault (drag-and-drop interface to rearrange your links)
5. Markaboo (helps you keep track of books you like)
6. Co.mments (another one with a . in a strange place)
7. Linkatopia
8. Bookmarktracker
9. Complore (specialty site linking researchers)
10. Linkfilter (they...filter....links...)

One that I like a lot is called Ka-boom-it. Cool name, cool little icon (a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse, running for his life) and an easy to use interface similar to smallbusinessbrief.com (fetch). If you like a story that's posted, you don't "vote" for it or "digg" it.....you, naturally, Ka-boom-it.

Here's one with a name that's hard to forget -- Blurpalicious. It's much like Digg in the way users vote for stories...or bury them. You can also add their widget, the Blurp Vote Box, to your own website.

We'll cover another group of ten or so in our next hub. This reminds me a little of college football recruiting -- it's always interesting to look back 4 or 5 years and see who the new guys were they were just arriving on the scene as 18-year olds. Usually you end up with some surprise stars who were not heavily recruited coming out of high school, and conversely, some of the schoolboy hotshots never pan out.

I'm betting we'll eventually catch a rising star from this group in the social bookmarking world. And we'll say "Why I remember when...."