This lens was originally intended to be part of my RSS Feeds & Syndication lens, but it quickly became apparent that it needed it's own space.
It's just a bunch of links at the moment, so flame gently, please. I'll be adding commentary RSN.
Bookmark / Subscribe
Why Bookmarks Matter
A lot of SEO "experts" will tell you that quality content is what matters in getting your pages (or "lenses") to the top of the search-engine rankings. They will frequently quote (directly or indirectly) material from a four-year-old edition of Google Hacks
Google's 'bots are good, but they're nowhere near artificially intelligent enough to know "quality" content from gibberish. The so-called SEO experts don't have that excuse.
Inbound links -- links from other sites to your page -- are far more important in determining your PageRank and placement in search engine results pages (or SERPs) than keyword density or other artificial means of estimating "quality."
How Bookmarks Work
Don't get me wrong. Quality does count. But it is human readers who will determine your pages' worthiness, not search-engine spiders. You could try to contact webmasters with similar pages and ask them to link to you or try some sort of reciprocal-linking scheme. These methods are generally tedious, labor-intensive and unreliable.
A far more productive approach is to give ordinary users (i.e. users who are not necessarily also webmasters) the means and the incentive to create those links.
Social bookmarking services provide that function. Users simply click a link which then allows them to store a link back to your page with the social bookmarking service. This facilitates optionally tagging, annotating, remotely accessing, and sharing (both importing and exporting) of links, while contributing to the service's database. It's a win-win-win proposition.
So Many Choices, So Little Time.
Social bookmarking services are relatively easy to implement, provided you have the necessary skills in CGI programming and database management, which is why they are popping up on the web like mushrooms after a good rain.
Each service has it's own set of features, and its own admirers and detractors, so it's hard to tell which one(s) will be most effective on your site.
Scott Conner (ekstreme.com) has developed an "ekstremely" effective app called socializer that addresses this problem. Visitors who click on the
social bookmark this
link go to a landing page where they can choose their favorite(s) from among several social bookmarking services. Sweet!
He even includes the Squidoo Bookmarklet which is a pretty good shortcut if you want to build a Table of Contents for your Squidoo lenses.
Major Social Bookmarking Services
My original design for this page involved reviewing all the social bookmarking services listed here. Unfortunately, they are proliferating faster than I can adequately test and review them, so I'll settle for highlighting a few exceptional ones ... for now!
- del.icio.us
- I'm not sure that del.icio.us was the first social bookmarking service, but it certainly was an early leader in the field, and is probably the most used service today.
- Furl
- Furl is the social bookmarking service of the Look Smart search engine. It's big, but IMHO not very good. The last time I checked they were extremely biased against content they deemed "commercial" except for their paid advertisers' sites.
Special-Purpose Bookmarking Services
Some social bookmarking services are restricted to a particular type of links or by some other criteria. These can be extremely valuable if your content falls within the appropriate categories.
- CiteULike
- CiteULike (.org) specializes in academic papers. They may or may not have much control over how "academic" their submissions are, but if you are in doubt "lurk before you leap."
- Give a Link (.org)
- GiveALink is a project of the Computer Science department of Indiana University (Bloomington). Links are used in a research project attempting to develop better ways of searching the web.
- Kinja
- Kinja bookmarks your favorite blogs (only), and tracks updates. No standard web pages, no RSS feeds, no Squidoo pages (!) -- just blogs. If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, might be just what you need to keep up with new postings.
Some Social Bookmarking Services
I'm finally getting around to updating this lens because it has experienced a sudden rise in traffic. I always try to "go with the flow" when this happens -- it's much more rewarding than trying to "drive" traffic to a page nobody is interested in.
In an earlier draft, the page consisted mostly of these links (a snapshot of the then-current links in socializer, basically) I'm not removing them any time soon, but they are secondary to the main topic.
The Links:
backflip
blinkbits
blinklist
blogmarks
buddymarks
citeulike
connotea
del.icio.us
de.lirio.us
digg
feedmarker
feedmelinks
furl
givealink
gravee
igooi
kinja
lilisto
linkagogo
linkroll
looklater
ma.gnolia.com
newsvine
The Whole Ed Cata-Blog
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I've never quite been sure what distinguishes a blog from a regular webpage. Timeliness seems to have something to do with it, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule.
Anyway, here are some of the things I've been working on lately...
Fetching RSS feed... please stand by
