The fundamentals: social bookmarking
In my last post, I introduced RSS feeds, and concluded saying you need to choose your feeds wisely or they might feel overwhelming. Here, I’ll present the concept of social bookmarking, by which groups of people collaborate in voting for the best sites they find on the Web.
Social bookmarking
Bookmarking, as you know, is saving favorite Web pages for later reference. Social bookmarking is about sharing bookmarks, to make the most popular content emerge.
Social bookmarking sites are therefore tools for surfers to aggregate their bookmarks in a public, organized space. Some of the most popular tools are Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and StumbleUpon. They all have the concept of “front page” or “top list”, which are the most popular links at the moment. This is what you need to keep an eye on.
The good thing is all those top lists have an RSS feed, and you can therefore track many of these lists from your RSS aggregator. They usually have RSS feeds for subtopics (tags), say “programming”, so you can be more precise on what type of links you want to get.
Communities
There are dozens more social bookmarking sites (Google for “social bookmarking sites”), often specializing in a particular topic, and each having its own community. Notably, some focus on the “news” items (ex: Newsvine), while others are more general (ex: del.icio.us).
The site community has strong influence on the quality and type of links and comments found on those sites. For example, MetaFilter is a site renowned for its focus on quality discussions, and charges a small fee for signup to encourage in that sense.
If you feel like it, you might join a site’s community and start sharing your own bookmarks, vote on those you like, and comment on them, therefore contributing to these communities and helping in the filtering process. By the way, blogs and sites often have a “submit on Reddit” button (or similar for Digg etc.) so if you liked the content you may help in promoting it, thereby encouraging the author.
You don’t need to share all your bookmarks, of course: you may still use the old fashioned browser bookmarks for those you deem private, and publish only links you choose.
Other sharing options
If you own a Web site, say a blog, it’s easy to display the RSS feed of your latest bookmarks to share them with your visitors.
You can also share them on social networks, say on Facebook, where it is possible to have links regularly updated on your profile from your del.icio.us feed, for example. Facebook in particular also has its own “share on Facebook” functionality integrated, so is also a social bookmarking site in its own right, albeit with more control on privacy.
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