Digg Delicious Social Bookmarks

You’ve probably seen them and wondered what they are. You know, the row of colorful icons found at the bottom or side of most, if not all, news and blog articles. The Miami Herald has five on the top right hand corner of its articles. The Wall Street Journal has three. The New York Daily News has neatly lined up ten on the bottom of its articles like a row Skittles.

But what exactly are they, what do they mean and what happens if you click on one of them? They are called bookmarks and they give Internet users a chance to bookmark their favorite stories. So-called “social bookmarking” is the act of sharing these favorites with the rest of cyberspace. But while a list of favorites on Internet Explorer or Firefox are organized using hierarchical folders, social bookmarks are organized by using tags – a set of keywords the user gives to describe the item.

But why bookmark? In the case of regular Internet users, bookmarking a particular story is a type of social service. A reader may bookmark a news story or a food recipe because they feel that others may benefit from reading it. But in the case of a user who is also a blogger, adding these “chicklets” (or what we called Skittles above) can be a great way to improve search engine optimization. It gives a reader the opportunity to share the blog with other readers of similar interest. Search engine rankings aren’t only governed by the amount of times people click on a site, but the rankings also rely on the links that are pointing to and from the site.

There are plenty of social bookmarking Web sites, all of which basically do the same thing. Here are a few of the more popular ones:

- Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious") is arguably one of the most popular social bookmarking Web sites with more than three million users and 100 million bookmarked URLs. The appeal of Del.icio.us is its easy to use interface and RSS feeds for Web syndication.

- Digg is one of the oldest social bookmarking Web sites in cyberspace. Aside from allowing users to bookmark an article, the articles are voted up or down if they are “digged” by other users. Only the articles that have the highest rating make the front page of the site.

- Mixx allows its users the same bookmarking and ranking features as the other sites, but it also has partnerships with several online publishing outlets including CNN.com, USA Today, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Weather Channel to have their content loaded directly to mixx.com. By voting up or down on the day’s news, users can influence the news found on the front page of the site.

Others include Furr, Newsvine, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Even the two popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, have recently gotten into the social bookmarking scene by allowing their members to post their favorite stories or blog postings on their pages for their friends to see as well.

Note though that almost all require you to register with their sites before bookmarking and ranking stories, except for Digg which allows you to rank stories without having to sign in.

All of these sites help contribute to the grand Web 2.0 scheme – the concept of the World Wide Web being a place to collaborate and share ideas. So go forth and Digg, Propell, Mixx and tag those stories!