Social Bookmarking – Gettin’ Diggy With It
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past two years, you’ve no doubt heard of social bookmarking.
But do you really know what social bookmarking is?
According to Wikipedia:
“Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users can also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to your own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others”.
One of the more interesting social bookmarking sites is Digg.com.
Digg is a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles.
It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a non-hierarchical, democratic form of editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system used by many other news sites.
Digg is all about user-driven content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Users can share, discover, bookmark and promote the news that is important to them!
Submitting stories is easy. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, simply click “submit a story” and enter the URL of the story you’d like to submit.
Then fill out a title, description, and category for the story. If you find a possible duplicate, please search for the original story and do not submit a duplicate entry.
Once a user submits a story, it is instantly published in the Upcoming Stories section. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the home page. To help promote stories on the home page, simply visit the Upcoming Stories section and search for stories you think are great. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. If the story does not get enough digs, exceeds 24 hours, or is reported, it is eventually removed from the Upcoming Stories section.
Digg works because a large group of people actively dig (promote) good stories and report (remove bad stories). Since the content on digg is user driven, it’s up to you to contribute.
So why should you care about social bookmarking?
In a word – traffic.
Sites like Digg and Delicio.us have a large number of users, many of whom are potential prospects for your products and services.
In closing, I have seen the future of the Internet, and its name is social bookmarking!