Social Bookmarking

I was reading this interesting article on CNet today about social bookmarking and figure I would share a few good quotes from it.

The new thing in feedback, at least for tech sites, is to flag a story on Digg.com. If you don’t know it, Digg is a fantastic site that collects pointers to Web links (stories, blog entries, and so on) from its users. Links that are popular bubble up to the top of the list. Users of Digg then see these links, and if they also like them, they click a little Digg It button to add another vote. It appears under a square box–called a chiclet by some (like me)–that lists the number of votes the link got. Del.icio.us is similar in some ways. (For a cool mashup of Digg and Del.icio.us, see DiggLicious.com, which displays new Digg and Del.icio.us links in real time, as they are posted.)

There are dozens of other social bookmark sites. Some focus on different topics (such as video) or have interesting user interface fillips. But they are all about the same thing: enabling members of a community to share the content they like the best.

Digg.com is the biggest of these social bookmarking sites and after having many stories “dugg” I can tell you the amount of traffic the site sends you is considerable – a front page Digg is worth over $500 in extra income for The TechZone on the first day.

Knowing that Digg relies on its readership to decide what goes and doesn’t go on the front page, sneaky webmasters have begun banning together to create “Digg Clubs.” A club member would list a story and all the members of the club would go digg it to the front page. This was a huge problem for Digg because it sent many stories of questionable quality to the front page. Since then, Digg has really cracked down on this practice.

Digg now use a series of tests to determine whether the diggs are part of an organized effort, instead of readers truly digging the story. The best way to get a story to the Digg front page is to create content that Digg readers want to Digg. Don’t try to cheat system; it will only get you banned.

You can read the full CNet article here.