The Social Bookmarking Revolution

Social bookmarking sites are relatively new phenomena that are growing in popularity every day. Three years ago, Digg was one of the first, and helped facilitate human interaction. Each of these sites provides a way for people to interact and exchange tips, comments and the like. This makes better people's online experiences. If you do a search for social bookmarking, you will find many of the best known sites, such as the aforementioned Digg, ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, SlashDot, and YouTube. Most of these sites are not geared to any particular subject or venue and have content covering just about every subject area.

Each has frequent visitors who submit contributions, comments, and other types of exchanges. Most are very user-friendly, so that even non-computer literate folks can use them. Some sites, such as Listible, are a bit more difficult to understand than more user-friendly sites. Of course, exchanging comments among people does not mean that you should not have your own opinion, so of course, you can disagree with other people's bookmarking choices.

One particular shortcoming of these types of sites is that they are not always able to weed out spammers or other inappropriate material. This is because many people simply want the search engine optimization these sites potentially offer and do not focus on providing real valued content. As these sites evolve and get better at weeding out inappropriate material, this type of activity will become less of a problem. Until then, you should probably simply ignore this activity when it pops up and move on to better material.

As the sites become more and more popular, some are becoming hot commodities and are bought by other owners for millions of dollars. Although some might find this mystifying, if a site has 150,000 subscribers, that means there is an e-mail list with that many names on it. This can be very effective as a marketing tool and can promote affiliate and third-party offers. Along with banners and advertising, they can give social bookmarking web sites substantial income, which owners can then pocket.

As more and more of these types of sites come online and compete with previously established ones, a site that does not have healthy growth will disappear from page rankings while the real players will become more and more prevalent. They may, as other sites have done, be sold for a large amount to other sites such as Google or Yahoo. However, if you are interested in niche social bookmarking, this, too, will become popular.

Richard Henderson runs his own internet marketing business from home. Check out these great Social Bookmarking sites or the more specific Vacations Bookmarks articles and guides.