Using social bookmarking

How to promote outreach sites

Social bookmarking is a way of storing links [www.site-reference.com/articles/General/Getting-The-Best-From-Social-Bookmarking.html] that you like, and sharing these ‘collaborative opinions’ with other people. (See also Wikipedia definition.) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking] The best known system is probably del.icio.us [http://del.icio.us] but there are many others. [www.answers.com/topic/social-bookmarking] and you can also see some listed here. Some are designed primarily for listing blog posts, but others are intended for any webpage. They are in competition with each other, and constantly trying to add new innovative features.

Look also at StumbleUpon.com [www.stumbleupon.com] which offers users random choices of member-recommended sites, or a search facility within categories (for multiple languages). (You need to download a browser toolbar to operate it – but you can hide this if you do not want it visible all the time. You can tag any page you recommend via the toolbar, using keywords of your choice. try to choose secular topics appropriate to the outreach site – for instance, ‘women’ ‘students’,‘life problems’ etc.)

You can also encourage people to add a del.icio.us (or other) bookmark by adding a graphic link on your website, as you can see in the footer of this page. (On this site, PHP coding automatically adds the page URL and title to customize the del.icio.us and StumbleUpon graphic links on each page.)

But equally strategic, if you join del.ico.us, stumbleupon.com or another social bookmark network, you can also add evangelistic websites that you feel are worth other people viewing to your list of bookmarks. Please take time to choose the best outreach sites you can find and add them to these systems. You could impact thousands of people indirectly.

So here’s a wonderful way that you can help other people find good sites that will help them. Why not join a network today and start bookmarking?

Using del.icio.us and other systems

It is quick and easy to register with these social bookmarking systems. Learning their full potential takes longer. The del.icio.us explanatory pages are possibly not the clearest. It will help you to google for third-party pages that explain del.icio.us (or the other systems). Here are several for del.icio.us:
1 [http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html] | 2 [http://sites.dehumanizer.com/delicious/en/delicious.php] | 3 [www.tomrafteryit.net/do-you-use-delicious-fully/]

You can also google for comparative reviews of the different systems.