More on social bookmarking services:

I spent some time cleaning up my tags this week, following Guy’s advice (2006). I imported all the bookmarks from my browsers (I always use IEx and Firefox simultaneously, since I organize favorites in each so I can find them) This will work much better once I adjust to the move.
I also followed Patrick’s advice, and got rid of the extra toolbar- thanks, Patrick!
To learn more about social bookmarking, I found a site (a blog, maybe? I can’t always tell) called Pandia Search Engine News with an article entitled Top 5 social bookmarking services (http://www.pandia.com/sew/327-social-bookmarking.html ). Pandia gives some good general information about what bookmarking is, and then tested about 20 social bookmarking sites and looked for the following criteria:
• “A decent amount of users is necessary. Otherwise the whole social aspect loses relevance.
• The service has to have quite extensive documentation, FAQ and/or help pages, to guide users.
• More advanced users will want good import and export possibilities. Import is necessary for bringing old bookmarks from your browser or from another online bookmarking service, export is important for backup copies and to ensure that your bookmarks can go with you to another service if you decide to switch.
• A good bookmarking service should have feeds (RSS and/or Atom) of tags or groups of tags.
• I would want my bookmarking service to have a blog so I can be kept up to date about new features, bugs, bug fixes and more.
All the top 5 social bookmarking services in this article comply with these criteria, except for Bluedot which doesn’t have an export option.” (http://www.pandia.com/sew/327-social-bookmarking.html ). Pandia chose LookSmart’s Furl , Netvouz , Del.icio.us , Ma.gnolia , and Bluedot . So there are some good options available for social bookmarking out there.

As I was poking around to learn more about social bookmarking, I stumbled upon another type of social bookmarking services, which are ways that marketers, or “SEO”s (Search Engine Optimizers) can feed sites into your social bookmarking page, to increase traffic to the marketed site. This is a function of social bookmarking I had not anticipated, but it makes sense.. advertising creatively is a hallmark of the internet, and the “American way”. “Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.” From Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/) one of these services.
“Social bookmarking submission has developed into a powerful tool for SEO experts. It involves linking sites within the various forums, blogs and message boards on social networking websites, blog sites and content centric sites like Digg. Considered a better alternative to submitting a website on blogs, manual social bookmarking is a simple, convenient and hassle-free way of making sure that your site is noticed and marketed in the right circle.”(from SubmitEdge, one such service, at : http://www.submitedge.com/social_bookmarking.html)
I had never thought about social bookmarking from a website marketer’s view… sites like del.icio.us are a great place to promote your own site, if you can use tags to get noticed by the users at del.icio.us. What a sneaky way to get your add to the perfect targeted audience… As I’m grappling to understand these services, I’ll make up an example: Pretend I’m a craftsman, making custom high-end furniture and shipping internationally. I own a company called woodsense.com (I made that up). I want interior designers and potential buyers to notice me, so I subscribe to SubmitEdge, who puts my company into a bunch of social bookmarking sites with tags that will attract the buyers I’m looking for. Great options for small business owners- but there must be a down side to social bookmarking services… I’ll look for that next week.