Understanding Social Bookmarking

[notepage]

Delicious is a social bookmarking system, that is notable, not only for its unusual web address http://del.icio.us, but for its unusual approach to content building that is becoming increasingly popular. In order to ease the burden of producing consistent stream of fresh content, publishers are turning to users to build, categorize and qualify content. While this is said to be part of the web 2.0 phenomenon, publishers realize the value of collaboration.

Social bookmarking allows users to qualify content. With Delicious, each "bookmark" of a specific webpage is seen as a vote of confidence. The more people who bookmark a specific webpage, the more credible the webpage is viewed.

In addition to bookmarking a webpage, users "tag" the webpage. The tags are simply single word keywords that relate to the contents of the webpage. The tagging associates keywords with the webpage's content, making it easier to categorize and classify the content of the webpage. If everyone bookmarking a page uses similar keyword tags, the webpage will be classified as a credible resource in a specific category.

As a webpage receives more and more bookmarks from different Delicious users, the listing for the webpage becomes more prominent in the Delicious listings. Delicious users can bookmark and tag multiple pages within a website. Content can be tagged with multiple terms. As more users tag the content, it becomes easier to find similar topics.



How to Use Delicious:

1. Create a Delicious Account
In order to create a Delicious account, you will need to provide a valid e-mail address, login name and password.


2. Verify an Account
An e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address provided when the Delicious account was created. You will need to click the link in the e-mail in order to fully activate the Delicious account.


3. Login
Login in to the Delicious account in order to begin bookmarking and tagging content.


4. Post URL
Enter the URL of a webpage or website that you find to be particularly valuable or useful.


5. Describe & Tag
Enter a descriptive page title and description that relates to the contents of the bookmarked webpage. In the final field enter single word keywords that relate to the webpages content, these will be the "tags".


Why Use Delicious?
Delicious can be used by professionals to share industry resources that are particularly useful. Delicious users store their favorite websites or resources online and other users can easily access bookmarks. Often websurfers will use Delicious to find resources that they consider to be relevant and qualified.


Delicious also takes advantage of RSS. RSS feeds can be used to syndicate user bookmarks or to aggregate content with the same tags. Generating RSS feeds allows users to syndicate bookmarks or to aggregate content that contains related tags. Users can also syndicate bookmarks that are created by other users using RSS feeds.


Bookmarks
Many users generate bookmarks that are all related as in this case of bookmarks all related to RSS:
http://del.icio.us/rssfeeds or the RSS feed of the same bookmarks at: http://del.icio.us/rss/rssfeeds


Other user bookmarks don't encompass a single theme as is the case with the following:
http://del.icio.us/oreck or the RSS feed of the same bookmarks at: http://del.icio.us/rss/oreck


As publishers struggle to create unique content, they are turning towards web surfers to qualify and categorize content. As a result social-bookmarking is becoming more prevalent as users weigh-in.


About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.

[DarkNinja]

It would be a little more useful if you gave some other examples of new web 2.0 companies that also do social bookmarking.

[andreas_is_here]

This may not be directly related, but I've come across a somewhat different approach to social bookmarking: Instead of "how many persons liked the link" (del.icio.us, digg etc.) it's more like "which links did person X like".

The Editaste RSS aggregator and social bookmark manager makes a fast connection between browsing and sort-of link blogging, so good links are spread, the bad ones die out.

Since every person's link collections form an RSS feed as well, other people can read the collection as an RSS feed, pick the good ones, put them in their own collections, and so on.

I keep my cool links at http://www.editaste.com/home/cool, or if you like the RSS feed: http://www.editaste.com/xml/cool