With all of the talk of microblogging and lifestreaming of late, I wonder how the lowly old art of social bookmarking is doing.
I think this question is particularly pertinent given that FriendFeed is giving new and heightened visibility to any kind of social media activity. For example, you can use FriendFeed to monitor your friends’ social bookmarking activity that occurs on sites like Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Furl, and Google Shared Stuff.
Seeing this activity front and center in a new way made me think about how and why we use social bookmarking. As I see it, there are four main reasons for indulging in social bookmarking.
- Used to track websites for our own future use
- Used to share information with our friends and social media contacts
- Used to support your friends and contacts in social media to help build up your own social media profile
- Used to build links back to websites for SEO purposes
The interesting thing about this is that the last three reasons are not for your own personal information tagging - they are for directing web traffic (i.e. other people) to specific websites. Although each person’s reasons for bookmarking will vary, there are plenty of reasons to bookmark for other people or for reasons other than their own information retrieval.
Therefore, when you see people bookmarking stuff in Del.icio.us, is it more likely that they are saving this information for someone other than themselves?
Bookmarking seems to be evolving from the original purpose of saving information for your own use at some later date. However, it’s still perfectly fine for its original purpose. However, how many of us really use it to its fullest potential?
I’ve researched social bookmarking on several different occasions. I looked at Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz and Google Bookmarks, as well as StumbleUpon. Without question I use StumbleUpon more than any other bookmarking application but I rarely go back to check out the things that I’ve bookmarked, nor do I ever search through StumbleUpon by tags.
For ease of use it’s hard to beat Del.icio.us, including its toolbar. Yet it seems so spartan.
Ma.gnolia hasn’t made much of an impression on me, although I understand it has strong groups and community.
Netvouz is probably the strongest bookmarking tool of all that I’ve used, but for some reason it hasn’t “stuck” with me. I think it’s because I know that I’d have to devote some time and energy to set it up properly so that I could use it to its fullest potential. Quite frankly, I’m a little too lazy to use it properly when I could just use StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.
In fact, I rarely ever go back to my bookmarks to check them again, relying mostly on Google searches or the favorites functionality in my web browser.
This begs the question: is tagging and bookmarking really worth the trouble for tracking your own information? I’m starting to wonder if it is.
So, I’ll turn the question over to you. Do you use social bookmarking? If so, do you regularly create bookmarks? And how often do you go back to find something that you’ve saved in a social bookmarking program?
Why not leave a comment and share your thoughts?
If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!
