Social Bookmarking - State of the Art Today

In the last year or so, a Mysterious List of Words & Logos have appeared on the web: Digg, Del.icio.us, PopURLs, Reddit, Fark, Blue Dot, StumbleUpon, tags, Ikeepbookmarks, and so-on.


This latest set of techniques is known as social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking can affect search engine position and provides an alternative approach for viewers to navigate the web.

Are all these services worth participating in and are they all the same? NO, some are specialized in some area, some are small, and some are old fashioned (can you believe it? There are already some old fashioned sites in this latest and greatest trends. ex Ikeepbookmarks).

Which are the ones to select? Well, here are today's leaders and how they are different....

StumbleUpon.com provides a new way to go around the net following links established by people who have recommended sites by category and popularity.

Digg.com is all about articles. People vote.

del.icio.us is more of a bookmarking tool. Your favorite are listed and connected with others. BTW, for a great explanation and howto on del.icio.ous, try this social bookmarketing video

technorati - A multimedia listing by tag of blogs, music, pictures.

Furl - A listing by tag of websites.

Reddit - Articles get tagged and voted upon with the votes weighted by the taggers karma. This is the least corporate (albeit owned by conde nast) of the services.

Now some people (such as gino) categorize social bookmarking sites as subset of social media sites and include the bookmarking sites above with the likes of:

MySpace: social networking site
Facebook: social networking site
YouTube: video sharing community
Flickr: photo sharing site
LinkedIn: professional networking
Wikipedia: web-based community-created encyclopaedia
Yahoo! Answers: community answer site
MyBlogLog: blog networking community
FIQL & Netlister - sharing playlists.


Time4Learning's parent forum has started using social bookmarking