Clipping articles from the newspaper and posting them on the refrigerator just doesn't cut it anymore. Now "social bookmarking" sites serve as virtual refrigerators, giving users an unlimited number of magnets and much more surface area. They also put stories on display for far more people than the family fridge ever did.
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Courtesy of roanoke.com
You've probably seen these icons on news sites. They illustrate links to social bookmarking sites where users can organize and share links with others. |
Social bookmarking came onto the scene in 1996 and has since developed into a tool for Web users to collect and share links and content, and for content providers to reach new audiences.
Information used to be scarce. News consumers could choose from a very limited number of newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations. Now news comes at people from all directions. They have an abundance of information and sources from which to choose. What they need now is help in processing and organizing this information.
Enter social bookmarking.
One of the purposes of social bookmarking sites is to aggregate and organize what users find useful, weird or thought-provoking. Users can not only control their own content, they can tell people why they chose what.
News organizations are embracing this phenomenon by adding to their own sites icons that viewers can click on to use various social bookmarking services. I visited 40 news sites, noted what social bookmarking services they offered to users, and compiled this information using the graph-sharing site
Swivel.com.
News organizations choices for social bookmarking
(40 sites surveyed)
Take a look at the two frontrunners in the social bookmarking community:
del.icio.usLike
most bookmarking sites, del.icio.us allows users to track what
people are linking to on the "hotlist." Custom URLs and tagging help to set the site apart and give it
more of a personal feel. Tagging allows you to group your links by topic, the way you might add folders to your file cabinet — but you can put content
in more than one folder. This practice makes it easy to do things like
plan a vacation, track a niche area of coverage or collaborate with
coworkers by sharing links useful to the group.
Using del.icio.us, users
create their own URL. Your homepage serves as the home to your links, your friends' links and links chosen by your "fans." A fan is someone who subscribes to a feed of your links.
You could, for example, add Poynter to your del.icio.us network.
You may be wondering why the URL for this site is del.icio.us and not
delicious.com. It is an example of something called a
domain hack, a crafty
tool used by programmers to create a succinct word play on the intended
URL. (Both delicious.com and delicio.us redirect you to the del.icio.us
page). In this sort of address, "del." takes the place of the usual "www." and ".us" takes the place of ".com." Between those combinations of letters, "icio" was an obvious choice.
Digg
Digg is more of an online popularity contest for Web sites, videos and podcasts based on what users choose. Users can "Digg" something by recommending or sharing a story. The number of Diggs that any link gets is an indication of its
popularity and gives the link more prominence on the site. The opposite of Digging is "burying." Users can demote content they find weak or not meaningful by burying it. Digg also predicts links and content likely to be popular.
Users have profile pages where they can easily track Digg stats: items they have Dugg, items they Dugg that have ended up being popular, the number of Digg friends they have, etc. Also, Digg content drives
conversation in Digg-hosted forums
, not in its original context. This is not the most popular feature with news organizations, which probably would prefer that these conversations happen on their sites rather than on Digg.
Don't
have time to be glued to the Digg homepage? Digg creators Kevin Rose
and Alex Albrecht use the top stories submitted to Digg each week to
drive the half-serious Web culture vodcast
Diggnation.
Check out Poynter's
Digg profile.
In
Part Two, we'll look further at the risks and opportunities offered to news organizations by social bookmarking.
