Social Bookmarking and Tagging

1. Social Bookmarking and Taging

Social Bookmarking and Tagging have been the subject of
discussion in a number of online learning forums for a number
of months.

Before the advent of Web 2.0, our only option for bookmarking
a website or blog was to use our browser's bookmarking facility.
With this facility you could add bookmarks randomly or "tag "
them by assigning them to a specific bookmark folder you
created.

The disadvantages of this private bookmarking approach were
that no one else had a access to your "favourites" and sometimes
when you changed or upgraded your browser you lost the lot!

As the name "social" bookmarking suggests the facility now
exists to store your bookmarking on public sites to enable you
to retrieve it whenever you want and to also make it accessible
to others.

When you store your bookmarks on one of the social
bookmarking sites you have to "tag" the bookmark with a
descriptive label (like you did with your browser folder),
so that you can find it in future and so that others can have
access too.

What emerges are organic communities of interest that
coalesce around a "tag" (and this is the real "hook" for online
learning networks).

Many people are using tags for their blog entries (see
below). You can use external tagging (by linking to social
bookmarking sites) and/or internal tagging (by linking
internally to related topics in your blog). Stephen Downes,
for example, uses internal linking extensively.

2. Social Bookmarking Sites

Some of the more common social bookmarking sites are:

* Del.icio.us - the favourite among bloggers; it was the
pioneer and is now owned by Yahoo.

* Furl

* Digg - focuses on technology news; uses submit stories
(links) for review by users whose votes determine placement
of the story.

* Yahoo's Web 2.0

* BlogMarks

* Technorati - major player; it combines content from
bookmarked sites with blog posts; used extensively in
Internet marketing and e-commerce.

(Technorati is also a site that you can ping to let them know
that you have updated your website or blog).

3. Tagging for Traffic: Internet Marketing and
E-Commerce

While social bookmarketing and tagging are in their relative
infancy within the online learning community, their use is
exploding in the areas of Internet marketing and
e-commerce.

The reason behind this is that tagging generates traffic
both from the social bookmarking site and from the search
engines. For example, your page ranking in the Google
search engine is improved if you have reciprocal links
with higly ranked sites like Technorati.

So now we have the emergnce of tagging optimization
alongside the established practice of
search engine optimization.

Lisa Ann Ginger, research assistant for a leading Internet
marketer, has produced a free, 9 page pdf document to
explain the basic approach to using tagging to get traffic
to your website or blog:
Tagging for Traffic:
Take Back Control from the Search Engine Monopolies

(Yes, the top Internet marketers have their own research
assistants, web traffic analysts, copywriters, programmers,
admin staff and forum moderators/help desk coordinators.)

Lisa has also written a more comprehensive e-book on
tagging for traffic that is for sale via Clickbank:
Tagging Secrets: How to Flood Your Sites with Traffic
on Demand


4. Visual Social Bookmarking

A relatively recent development in the area of social
bookmarking is the emergence of public sites that accept
visuals (screenshots or single images). The approach to linking
images to bookmarks ranges from showing a screenshot of the
bookmarked site (e.g. Blinklist) to letting the user add a single
image along with the bookmark (e.g. Kaboodle).

Of course, online shopping merchants quickly caught on to
the power of visual bookmarking to display their products
and generate traffic to their websites.

The potential of marketing online learning via
visual social bookmarking is relatively unexplored.

If you want to know more about visual social bookmarketing
sites and/or their application to online marketing and online
shopping, you can download the June 2006 issue of the free
Affiliate Classroom Magazine which has an article titled:

Online Shopping Meets Social Bookmarking
by Katalin Torok

The tags for this posting (both external and internal are given
below).

PS: if you want the relevant html code please email me.

Technorati Tags: online learning, social bookmarking, Internet marketing, tagging, tagging optimization, Affiliate Classroom Magazine

Internal Tags: Blog and Ping Tutorial