Social Bookmarking

Digg, SumbleUpon, delicious, ma.gnolia, reddit, addthis…What in the world are these websites? You may have heard of one or several of these recently, or you may have no idea what they are. Have no fear, the Tourism Tech Corner is here to help you out.

These are all social bookmarking sites. Have you ever come across a website or an article that you really enjoyed, and wanted to share it with a friend? If you’re like many people, you probably copy and paste the website address into an email and shoot it out to the friends who you think might enjoy the article. This works just fine if you have a small group of friends to share that link with. What happens if you wanted to share that article with more than just that small group of friends? That’s where social bookmarking comes in.

I personally have an account with delicious and use it almost daily when I come across interesting websites. Whenever I come across something I enjoy, I bookmark it using delicious. When I bookmark the link, I can leave a comment about it and I can “tag” it with words that help identify what the article or page is about. For example, if I bookmarked this page in delicious, I might put a comment in that says “This post is amazingly helpful this and everyone should read it if they want to understand social bookmarking”. I’d then “tag” it with words like “SocialMedia” “SocialBookmarking” “tutorial”, etc.

The descriptions and tags help out other users of delicious when they search for links that other users have posted. I can go into delicious and search for “SocialBookmarking tutorial” and this post will come up! That is the magic of social bookmarking. It takes that email you would have sent to maybe 5 or 10 people and puts that link out to anyone looking for it.

Think of social bookmarks as your globally-available bookmarks folder. Right now, you’ll save websites you like to the bookmarks folder within your internet browser. Well, social bookmarking can put those up for the world to see. If you’d rather not have everyone see which websites you’re bookmarking, you can keep your bookmarks private. But storing them at delicious or some other social bookmarking website makes those links available to you no matter where you are. If you can get to the internet, you can get to your bookmarks. You won’t have to worry about the website that you bookmarked at work and just can’t remember once you get home, just log into your social bookmarking site, search for the bookmark you’re looking for and it’s there for you.

Ok, so you know what social bookmarking is and how it’s helpful, but what if someone wants to “socially bookmark” your site? Many social bookmarking websites have “plug-ins” for your internet browser that allow you to click a button and bookmark any page, but the best thing you can do is add social bookmarking functionality to your own website. This will ensure that anyone can bookmark your site, you don’t have to just hope they have a social bookmarking “plug-in” installed in their browser.

The most popular (and easy) way to set up your website to be socially bookmarked is by setting up an account at AddThis.com. You’ve probably seen thier link at the bottom of some websites you’ve visited:

AddThis.com is the #1 bookmarking and sharing button and it’s really easy to set up an account. Simply add some code to the end of each page and people can begin bookmarking your website with ease. AddThis.com even offers tracking. You can see how many people on a given day have bookmarked your site.

Social bookmarking is a great way to get started in the world of social media, and is a great compliment to FeedBurner (which I talked about in my RSS post)