Blogs and Social Networks  

Social Bookmarking Sites

What can social bookmarking sites do for you? How do they work?

and How do you pick the ones that will work for you?

These are good questions to be sure, but what questions should you ask yourself before choosing your personal social bookmarking sites. Let’s begin with a short list to get you headed on the correct path. What do you want from a bookmarking site? Are friends a big draw for you? Are you primarily wanting to focus on page ranking?  Would you like more exposure to your individual posts? Do your most recent posts need more attention or the front page of your site? Are you up for a popularity contest or are you seeking content related ratings? Would you like a few social bookmarking sites to focus on to really make an Internet difference in exposure or just one? Do you have one blog, social network, or site and want many social bookmarking sites? Or do you have blogs and social networks or other sites and want to focus on a few social bookmarking sites?

To shed some light on the answers to these questions and possible more you would really need to research the masses of social bookmarking sites available to Internet users today. I personally have checked into a few of the major and minor players in the social bookmarking sector of the net and will list a few of the ones I have found useful.

Claim ID

Claim ID is a free sign up site. After setting up your personal visitors profile page, viewers will see a photo and a bit of a bio on you along with your compilation of sites you have entered. This list has areas for descriptions of the sites you add and the link is live and takes the visitor directly to your site. It is sort of an all inclusive “What sites do I have to offer” page which some call a link resume. Verify the sites you list as this will gain you credibility. Claim ID and Open ID are fairly simple sites and an easy way to manage your online presentation identity of hyper-linked URLs.

Yahoo Buzz

Yahoo Buzz is a social bookmarking site  where stories are ranked by your votes.  Submit your own stories to the Buzz or just hang out and vote on other members submissions.  The voting system at Buzz allows voters to vote up or down on any given story to promote or take away promotion of a story. There is a complete FAQs section at Yahoo Buzz that will answer navigation, system, and other questions. Buzz is people driven and popularity on your chosen stories is a must for high ratings. I found Buzz to feature celebrity and political stories highest. If you have a Yahoo email account, you are just a click away from getting involved with Buzz.

MyBlogLog

One of the bigger social bookmarking sites, MyBlogLog, is also owned by Yahoo.  This site is also user driven as far as popularity of sites on MyBlogLog.  Your creation personal profile area has a listing for all your personal sites from social networks, blogs, or any web site that you could want to create a list and subsequently a “Group” for. Inputting each of sites at MyBlogLog then creates a “Group” for that site that other members of MyBlogLog can join. Sub groups with the head being a web site. MyBlogLog also has an area to list your social networks under “Services”. This list creates a feed from each of these sites and services and posts the actions right on your viewable personal profile page. Visitors who come to your MyBlogLog site will be able to view all of the submissions you have made to your entire list of sites and services right from your home page. Again, a similarity to a link resume but with a higher interaction level than with Claim ID on the friending side.

Ma.gnolia

Magnolia is a social bookmarking site with the plus of a Wiki. My first impression here was a feature of Art and Photography. The video tutorials on the roots section are a must and the discovery searches and friend capabilities here at Magnolia are also a big attraction to this site. Keeping your sites together collected on a social bookmarking site like Magnolia allows you access to your favorites anytime no matter which computer you are using. Finding out what others like and enjoy and then sharing your bookmarks with your friends who have the same interests as you is one of the many highlights to this site. Magnolia makes the social side of social bookmarking work better.

Bloglines

Bloglines tracks your favorite news, blogs, weather, and classifieds so you don’t have to. This social bookmarking site allows the user to read, save, and share all in one place. Users of PC’s, Mac’s, cell phones, and iPhones can investigate Bloglines top one thousand, lists of popular feeds, interact on site, and more. Bloglines differs from Google Reader a bit on features. With Google Reader’s feed list, you are able to share individual posts or entire feeds for others to then view on your Google Reader home page. Google Reader’s site also features a portable coding widget to embed on your personal blogs or other sites. This is a big plus as using Google Readers widget on your sites also adds fresh content to them. One of the incredible and numerous draws to using the Google related social bookmarking site.

Newsvine

Newsvine is a different sort of social bookmark. It really focuses on headline, interesting, and right now news and articles. Newsvine offers a toolbar button to make it quite easy to submit any article or story you find to your newsvine profile page. Like Stumbleupon, Newsvine concentrates on individual posts, news articles and stories, not necessarily ones you wrote, but ones you or others have found to include in the mixx at Newsvine or Stumbleupon. Another major interest here at Newsvine are the groups. This is a very “news paper boy” oriented site for top stories, tech, science, and curiosity raising stories. If you happen to be the first to submit a particular article, you have the honor of writing a short description and getting head lined in the article as being the “finder”.

Stumbleupon

While Newsvine and Stumbleupon have the toolbar button feature, Digg usually houses an online, on site button to Digg a story, post, or article. Friending is a feature of Stumbleupon, Newsvine and Digg. Rather required at Digg, as without friends, your chances of other members “digging” your input are fewer. So keep in mind that the friending features are prevalent at MyBlogLog, Digg, Newsvine, Magnolia, Yahoo Buzz, and to some extent with the sharing factor Google Reader.

Digg

Technorati is in its own league and category I think when it comes to social bookmarking sites. Technorati has its own rating system to determine “Blog Authority”. Running with the big dog blogs like People, Tech Crunch, Boing Boing, LA Times, and Google will take a lot of focus and precision, SEO, and detail work. Getting in line with what Technorati has to offer may take a bit of time to navigate around and learn the system, but well worth the effort if this is your end run result.

Technorati

Social bookmarking sites like delicious have a system for running the tags or keyword phrases all together. As opposed to “work at home free trial”, they would run the words together and use workathomefreetrial as the actual keyword phrase or tag. While other social bookmarks allow only one word at a time and will separate the entire phrase like “work, at, home, free, trial. I believe these sites to be a bit outdated as far as Google ratings are concerned. Many search engines prefer the entire phrase as the long tail keyword as it forms a better connection between these individual words, so keep this in mind as you choose.

Zimbio

Zimbio may not seem like a social bookmarking site at first glance but delving further into this Wiki based site I found that indeed it works like a social bookmark for individual posts. Zimbio will gain exposure to individual posts from the blog sites you list with them by categorizing each post into a separate Wiki. That is really what some social bookmark site do, gain you more exposure to your posts and sites.

Blink List

Social bookmarking sites can be social featured and driven like Technorati or Digg or just for your personal favorites and listing uses. Furl is one for you personally as is My Bookmarks and Blink List. These sites are for you to store your favorites and have access from multiple computers. Clip Marks lets you “clip”  the section of the page you wish to save or bookmark rather than the entire page. A paragraph, sentence, image or video. The exact part of the page that you wish to favorite.

Clip Marks

Choose from user voting sites like propeller or Digg, friending sites, sites just for you, bookmarking sites that also offer cool widgets for your blogs, link lists, community driven or rated by the site, private bookmarks, group featured sites, news focused sites, or the multi social bookmarking sites like MyBlogLog.

Making a list of questions you want answered and features you need, focusing on the end result desired along the way and using “Do you want to make a list of saved pages for yourself?” Or “Am I looking for page ratings primarily for my sites or individual posts?” These questions will whittle down your starting point in the location of social bookmarking sites for you.

Stephanie Haile aka Wavecritter Google Me