Social bookmarking – the sentient search engine?

By Ben Temple, Director, Totosites

You probably already bookmark your favourite websites, using your web browser. This is a great time saver, when you need to find useful websites. However, your bookmarks are then tied to the computer you have saved them on. Wouldn’t it be nice to find them from any computer? In addition, when you change machines, wouldn’t it be great to have all of those sites at your fingertips?

Many businesses now use cloud-based email servers, document centres and social networks in order to stay on top of things. When you are working in a fast paced business environment, access to the right information becomes a competitive advantage.

Social bookmarking sites are like sentient search engines. The indexing and referencing is done by human beings. As you know, the human brain is quite different from a computer. It works on a contextual basis and each person brings a lifetime of human experience to bear to the task in hand (in this case, social bookmarking). On the other hand, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing!, use algorithms to figure out the meaning of a resource. This is highly clever: but it is not human.

Another benefit of social bookmarking is that people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. (Why not try and bookmark some of the pages on your website?)

Social bookmarking should be an integral part of your promotional mix. If you are a blogger (and you should be!), adding social bookmarking buttons to your blog is a great way of driving more traffic to your site. ‘Content is King’, so adding regular, fresh material, loaded with relevant keywords, will push your site up the search engine rankings.

The first social bookmarking site was launched in 1996, called itList, so it’s certainly not a new concept! There are hundreds of different sites that offer social bookmarking around the world. Some of our favourites are: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Google Buzz.

Here’s a fun little video that we’ve found, that will help you understand how to use social booking marks in a little more detail: www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english