Is Social Bookmarking A Form Of Spam?

Now an interesting thing to consider is whether or not social bookmarking (especially adding your own site as a bookmark ) is an attempt to spam. I guess if your intent at the outset was to spam then yes. If your intent is to legitimately brand yourself or your product or service then absolutely not. Again the network is social which means its user controlled content (by the many) and junk don’t last long.

Remembering that web 2.0 is us teaching the machine, social bookmarking your own site is you teaching the machine that in fact you do exist, look at me I am here, not there.

Take StumbleUpon as an example. You elect to join the service and upon doing so you also agree to view other stumblers pages. I proceed to ad my sites, tag it and give it a description, which at this point I am teaching the machine who I am. Is that spam? I don’t really believe for a minute that it is. Now the thing you have to remember about StumbleUpon is that it is a social network and the user controls whether a site lives or dies. If you get the thumbs down all the time your chances of being accepted as valuable content diminish quickly and the value of StumbleUpon is lost to you and your are left to your spam hole.

With all social media the number one thing is you have to participate. Participation has rewards in the form of finding people interested in what you’re interested in which usually breeds collaboration.

Can Del.icio.us and Blinklist also be a form of spam? Again I am teaching the machine who I am. In the case of both of these sites its simple, if your site is MFA (made for adsense), Geoscity throw back or just plan garbage with worthless content full of spam just to drive your ads from Google then again the value of your opportunity to teach the machine is lost to you. and you will soon drop to the bottom of the spam bucket.

The key with any social media is to be real and give content that is both accurate and helpful so that other users value your content enough to add it to there favorites. If they have taken the time to add you then you have sparked their interests. They will most likely come back to you site or share it with their friends. Goal accomplished.

Now using the social bookmarking service the way you should by adding blogs or sites you find interesting enough to share only helps the community as a whole by providing relevant content and giving the users the say in what they like and dislike, versus some search engine results telling them what they want to know by placing a list of top results in front of them. I think by far the greatest form of spam control is user control spam control.

Same goes for posting at or linking to someones blog or site. Could this be considered spam? An absolute yes - if abused. If you come in with one liner comments or your track backs lead to obvious spam on another person Blog with the sole intent to spam your product or service that has nothing to do with the post at hand then yes that is spam at its finest. On the other hand if you find the content interesting and want to legitimately respond to or link to the content in your own way then no I don’t think that is spam, but I guess that is in the eyes of the blog owner to judge what is spam and what is not.

Keeping your intention honest while using social media to teach the machine will go along way in how you will be received by the community of the Web.

social bookmarking information

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features

social bookmarking sites list

i89.us - Export to several formats, see popular & recent bookmarks, ability to shorten URLs.

AllMyFavorites.net - Create an organized page for your bookmarks that you can share with friends and family, access from any computer.

Backflip.com - Check out the most popular links each day, set “The Daily Routine” as your homepage so you can visit your must stop sites each day with ease.

BibSonomy.com - Public & private bookmarks, tag cloud, related tags, duplicate detection with the chance to merge their info.

BlinkPro.com - Dynamic folders, bookmark all links of a page plus all the usual features.

BlogMarks.net - Save your bookmarks, tag them with keywords for easy searching amongst your list, share with others.

Bluedot.us - Tabbed user page showing a network of friends, bookmarks, and related tags. Allows you to import contacts from all the major mail services such as GMail and Yahoo.

BmAccess.net - Bookmark a site, add tags, when you look up a tag, you get the names and a little thumbnail image of the site along with it.

BuddyMarks.com - Store your bookmarks online, share some or all of them, discover new sites to visit by searching the public bookmark area.

Chipmark.com - Browse random “chipmarks”, share them, sort, filter, and get personal recommendations.

Complore - 10MB of file storage, public & private sharing, tag cloud, popular feeds and more.

Connectbeam.com - A themed social bookmarking site for enterprise-scale business.

Connectedy - Import your bookmarks, batch edit them, check in on hot topics.

Connotea.org - A themed social bookmarking site specifically for researchers, clinicians and scientists.

Diigo.com - Highlight portions of a page, write on it like you would a piece of paper, share with your group, and search all publicly saved pages.

Excites.com - Organize your bookmarks by tags, add comments and notes, share publicly, subscribe to certain tags so you can be notified when a new site is added that may interest you.

Feedmelinks.com - All the usual social bookmarking goodies, but you can also add links via email.

GetBoo.com - Export your folders to HTML, import and remove duplicates, delete all bookmarks.

Givealink.org - Donate your bookmarks to this site to help them recommend sites and get a better understanding of how each person bookmarks.

Hyperlinkomatic.com - Import/export, categories, notes, sharing, block users, RSS, tags.

IKeepBookmarks.com - Folders, search folder names and more.

Lilisto.com - Ratings, notes, categories, smart categories and in-page editing.

Linkroll.com - Links open in new window, subscribe to tags, browse by archives.

Ma.gnolia.com - Discuss all the saved bookmarks in groups, see what the Featured Linker is all about, join discussions in the Hot Group.

Mister-Wong.com - Bookmark and tag, search for tags that interest you, make buddies with people who have interesting saved sites.

Netvouz.com - Save your bookmarks in folders, tag them with keywords, share them with others or password protect them.

Nextaris.com - Folders, tags, clippings; store up to 100MB for free.

Shadows.com - Share your already existing bookmarks, discuss and rate sites and see what you can find.

SocialBookmarking.org - User and global tag cloud, blogs, social networking, avatars and more.

StumbleUpon.com - Lets you “channel surf” the Internet and review sites; it learns what you like and recommends more of the same.

Unalog.com - A basic social bookmarking site, but with the ability to look back at specific days and see what was going on.

WireFan.com - You can vote on links as well as add thumbnails for sites.

Xilinus.com - Tags, rating, search, public & private listing, drag-and-drop sorting.

Yahoo! My Web - One button click adds your bookmarks to the search engine giants system, features duplicate detection to help you keep your bookmarks tidy.

Social Bookmarking Sites With Clipping


BlinkList.com - Save sites for later reading, share your list or keep it private, even send your saved pages to your blog for wider sharing.

Clipclip.org - Like an online scrapbook, you clip out the part of the site you want, then share it with whomever you want, and discover new places to visit.

Clipmarks.com - Allows you to clip just the chosen bits of a webpage, save them to the main website, or even insert them into your own blog. Think of it as fancy block quoting.

del.icio.us - You add your bookmarks and access them from anywhere. Check out what others are saving and see where it takes you.

Furl.net - Not only can you do the standard bookmarking and sharing, you can save archived versions of a webpage and even export all your saved pages to a ZIP file.

Linktopia.com - Keep private, share, mark as friends only, edit bookmark dates.

RawSugar.com - Can cluster your tags for you based on recommendations by other users.

Simpy.com - This social bookmarker does all the usual plus detects links that have changed, and distributes your bookmarks via your blog’s RSS if you like.

Spurl.net - You can upload your existing bookmarks to get started, add more for centralized access, check out hot lists and recommendations.

SyncOne.net - All the usual features plus the ability to add your own Google Ads to the top of your profile page.

URLex.info - Inbox, group creation, directory, all of the usual features, plus being able to send your RSS feed to the site.

Social News


Blog-buzz.com - Similar to Digg, but for blog posts.

Digg.com - Synonymous with social bookmarking: you Digg a story, others Digg it, the more popular it gets the better chance it has of hitting the first page.

Netscape.com - A former contender in the browser wars, and the “mother” of Mozilla, it’s now a a social news aggregator with voting of stories similar to Digg.

Newsvine.com - Users can write articles on current news events, save links to external content; vote, comment and chat on article pages created by both users and by journalists.

Reddit.com - You vote up or down on a story making it move around on the home page.

Shoutwire.com - Similar to Digg, except instead of “Digging a story”, you “shout it”. Still a way to vote on unique Internet news stories.

Thoof.com - Add news stories you find interesting, anyone can “improve” the article by fixing the URL, editing the summary and more.