Social Bookmarking

We all have a collection of web pages bookmarked in our favorite browser—those pages you visit time and time again but hate typing in to the address bar every time, or they may be pages that have long, complicated addresses. I'll bet you've even sent those links to friends via an instant messaging program or an email message.

Social bookmarking takes this practice and makes it interactive; it makes it fun. Social bookmarking websites allow you to keep your bookmarks online so they are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. Social bookmarking sites also allow you to easily share those links with your friends and keep an eye on which links your friends (or strangers) are bookmarking.

Some of these sites even allow users to rate your links, pushing good resources or funny videos to the top of the pile while the poorer links remain buried, just sitting in your collection.

Adding your videos and even your YouTube channel link to various social bookmarking websites could potentially drive a lot of viewers to your work.

Examples of popular social bookmarking sites include the following:

Digg is probably the most popular but also one of the easiest to manipulate. Users have been known to create what I like to refer to as Digg clubs. Basically, stories are featured on Digg's front page, pulling in tons of traffic, based on how many people bookmark, or digg, the article. So, if you get enough friends together, you can all agree to digg each others' bookmarks, thus sending all of their, and all of your, bookmarks to the front page. Digg even includes a feature, known as the shout, to help you with this. You can shout any article to any single user, or any group of users, via email (Figure 10-1).

Clicking the link from the shout email will take you directly to the bookmark on Digg where you can choose to digg it (Figure 10-2).

Shouts sent from Digg notify you of new bookmarks from your friends.

Figure 10-1. Shouts sent from Digg notify you of new bookmarks from your friends.

Digging bookmarks on Digg will help push the article onto the front page.

Figure 10-2. Digging bookmarks on Digg will help push the article onto the front page.

The practice of digging for a returned digg could be construed to be against the site's terms of use. However, if you truly enjoy your friends' videos, and they yours, I don't see anything wrong with helping to bring as many viewers to that video as possible.