Social bookmarking sites - what and why

Del.icio.us Technorati Tag

Over the weekend, I was introduced to a new phrase "Social bookmarking website". So I decided to find out more.

What are social bookmarking websites?

Social bookmarking websites are internet sites that allow users the option to store their favourite sites and webpages online, and label them with tags.

Since the bookmarks are stored online, they are not limited to a particular computer. (*plus point for people on the go).

There are many social bookmarking websites; the popular ones being Del.icio.us and Digg and also Technorati, Flickr


More about Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us ...is a collection of favourite sites- yours and everyone else's.

Del.icio.us allows you to

Keep links to your favourite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes etc from and access them from any computer on the web. Add your bookmarks from anywhere

Share favorites with others - friends, family and coworkers

Discover new, cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved.

What are Tags

Tags help to organise and remember your bookmarks.

Tags are one-word descriptors that you assign to your bookmarks.

Tags are basically keywords - it can be a category or a subject. Tags are how you summarise your webpage or site.

Tagging is flexible
Because tagging is more flexible than categories or folders, and can be created easily, it can result in grammatical errors, misspelled words, singular and plural forms of the words, and spaced and unspaced versions of the word/phrase. To each his own.

Some service providers like Technorati allows you to tag your own content and add it to to the Technorati index

Use of Social bookmarking sites
Traffic-wise, tagging is another method of getting your website and blogs to be found by users. That's free traffic generation! Assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, to increase the chances of being found.

Social bookmarking sites generate traffic to your site. It is time to monetise the traffic- convincing sales letter (promoting affiliate products or your own products), adsense clicks and so on.

Cool ways of using bookmarking system

Doing a research? Keep your source materials online

Going on a holiday? Save links to hotels, activities, food, transportation

What's cooking? Save the links to your recipes online

Other social bookmarking sites allow you to save your videos (YouTube), photos (Flickr).