Isaac Marion was a Seattle-based blogger and writer who was largely unknown in 2008, until his short story I Am a Zombie Filled With Love was distributed on his website and purchased by about 100 readers. The story was also reviewed by a lot of users on the Stumble Upon network, and it was so highly rated that Cori Stern, a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, literally stumbled upon the story and instantly thought it would make for a great movie.
Stern reached out to Marion and told him he should convert the short story into a longer novel, which turned into the recently published "Warm Bodies." From there, Stern introduced Marion's work to her colleagues Laurie Webb and Bruna Papandrea (whose past projects include movies with Sydney Pollack and Milk) and the story was so good that it turned into a movie deal with Summit Entertainment, the same production company behind The Hurt Locker and the Twilight films.
Had Stern not stumbled upon the story, none of this would have been possible. The story speaks to how powerful social bookmarking and crowd-sourcing sites can be. But what is it? Social bookmarking, at its most basic form, is a simple way to organize all of the best content from around the web based off your interests, all in one place. While the Internet created an unprecedented level of access to all content, many users found it difficult to sort the relevant from the irrelevant, according to their interests and the value of the information provided. And perhaps most importantly, the bookmarks are transferable between computers and locations.
Which social bookmarking site you use is all a matter of preference, and partially based on your usage patterns and interests. Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Google Bookmarks and to a certain degree Twitter and Facebook. According to Delicious, probably the most popular site of all-time in the space, social bookmarking "means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest."
"No matter what computer you're on, at your place of business or at home, you have your bookmarks stored," notes Justin Levy, the director of marketing, business development and corporate strategy at New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency outside of Boston. "The social side of it is that these bookmarks are hooked into a directory of other bookmarks that are being saved by other users, so you can filter the content based off your interests, whether that's for personal or business purposes."
In this guide, we will explore the different social bookmarking options and which you should use and also explore how social bookmarking sites can help your business.
A Look at the Competition
The ten most popular social bookmarking sites, in terms of inbound links or in other cases monthly visitors (though not listed in any particular order) are: Twitter, Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, Tweetmeme, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious, Google Bookmarks and Mixx. Here is a quick overview of each:
Twitter, while known more as a social networking site, also is the most-used social bookmarking site on the Internet. If you consider how many people retweet and share links, it's a great place to find content.
Digg, despite recent struggles due in large part to a recent site redesign, allows users to give content a thumbs up or thumbs down (though their "bury" feature was recently taken away). Based on those opinions, news can be pushed to the top or bottom of a newsfeed, making popular pieces more popular and less read pieces floating more into obscurity, or becoming "buried" if you will.
Yahoo! Buzz allows editorial control for users to link to sites, stories, and more by therefore raising their "buzz," and unlike many of the other sites actually allows the user to edit the content. Tweetmeme is the most popular retweet website, and is the simplest way to share a story once you've found it on a website. Many users of popular news sites are already using the Tweetmeme button when they recommend an article, and many without even knowing it.
StumbleUpon is a self-billed "intelligent search engine" that sorts news based on your community and your interests, so you can literally stumble upon news that is relevant to you. It has a free toolbar that is integrated into your web browser, so when you're on a website you literally can give it a thumbs up or down. Reddit, the only site owned by a major news corporation (Condé Nast), puts all of the power in the user's hands. Everyone rates up or down what they find, so it's all about each individual user submitting quality content. The most successful links will gain prominence by reaching the front page.
Technorati is an open source software services that originally contained mainly blog content. Today, it measures a site's standing and influence within the blogosphere. Google Bookmarks utilizes Google's existing reach to let you access data wherever you are with your existing Google accounts. Mixx is quite similar to Digg, asking users to submit their favorite URL's while rating the recommendations of other users. The more in-depth you're reviews and recommendations, the better results you get.
Delicious, the preferred form of social bookmarking for Levy, uses a non-heirarchal classification system where users can tag their bookmarks with index terms and sort them into folders. Websites can tag their own content to improve their search engine optimization, as can users. Additionally, stories are arranged according to the tags posted on your entries as opposed to the topics they cover.
"Besides using Delicious to solely save bookmarks that I find interesting or use often, I use the tool to create libraries of information that I then can share with others," Levy says. "Personally, I can consume hundreds of articles every day, so sorting and organizing the ones I think are the most useful in a carefully chosen set of tags is great. I own a restaurant as well, so I have tags all around recipes, but those tags wouldn't be relevant for my other work, so that works really well."
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