Monday, August 06, 2007

Another approach to sharing your articles

On one of my new "top article directories" sites, I found that they (http://searchwarp.com) are saying they use site maps and social bookmarks to share articles.

This opened another promotion opportunity - essentially articles are sharing the data you have. As people form more communities (and there are lists of over 130 of these bookmarking sites), then getting on the right social bookmarking communities would enable your article to be spread more easily.

de.licio.us was bought up by Yahoo and so works with your Yahoo login. (This is a logical acquisition, since Yahoo is basically a bookmark directory, by history.) My use is in finding social networks which share these bookmarks, and have great cross-community search facilities, such as Simpy. Furl is another, which has grown and evolved. (While Squidoo is known as a form of this, they still have a clunky interface - unlike the one's linked above.)

My own requisites:
* completely democratic sharing - peer to peer without moderation (Digg didn't make it) or having to "invite your list" (I consider this a form of spamming your friends - not wise).
* unlimited search, showing most popular and relative popularity of tags across the community
* able to be integrated into the browser (via right click - I can't use another toolbar)

Social bookmarking just brings up this concept of "natural keywords" - where people are finding certain words or phrases which epitomize what they are looking for or using in their lives. Advertising and SEO are simply jumping on this to monetize that normal function.

By tagging or using keywords, you will bring more exposure to your work - by knowing commonly associated keywords, you can then get a broader reach through your writing. And so this adds to the tools in promoting your articles, blogs, and lenses (Squidoo makes you add tags when you set up your lens).

There is much, much more to work up along this line. For now, I've picked the top items above (3) and will see how this goes. Later, I'll look for niche communities in business/making-money-online and attraction/self-help

» Top 5 social bookmarking services: "What to look for
When researching for this article, I registered with and tested over 20 tools for social bookmarking. Some were discarded because of bugs or spam. The remaining were sorted by these criteria:

* A decent amount of users is necessary. Otherwise the whole social aspect looses relevance.
* The service has to have quite extensive documentation, FAQ and/or help pages, to guide users.
* More advanced users will want good import and export possibilities. Import is necessary for bringing old bookmarks from your browser or from another online bookmarking service, export is important for backup copies and to ensure that your bookmarks can go with you to another service if you decide to switch.
* A good bookmarking service should have feeds (RSS and/or Atom) of tags or groups of tags.
* I would want my bookmarking service to have a blog so I can be kept up to date about new features, bugs, bug fixes and more."

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