In many occasions, I’ve considered placing link buttons or icons to social bookmarking Web sites since many users of such services could save a couple of clicks and page loads if ever they want to share my entries to other users. Most of the time when I go scouring the Web for interesting articles, I see more or less than a dozen link icons to those sites within the blog entries. But, I ask myself: Do I really need to place all these links just for users to select which one they’d prefer to use?
The primary concept of social bookmarking seemed better than those of search engines with Web spiders doing the hunting for articles compared to the hunting done by people, thus, the content would most likely be useful.
But the present situation of multiple users and multiple services all acting on a single entity [i.e., a blog entry, an article] can be quite messy to deal with especially since it does not conform to the social aspect of social bookmarking.
One major point of this is the emergence of all other bookmarking sites just after del.icio.us became popular. Since then, the aggregation of content [i.e., article bookmarks] became difficult because the proprietary nature of different social bookmarking sites prevents [e.g.] diggs and spurls from being counted together.
For example, if there are fifty different persons with each using a different social bookmarking Web site and they all bookmarked this page once on their respective service, it will still rank lower than a page marked only twice on just a single bookmarking site by only two people.
With all of these thoughts on how impure the social bookmarking trend came to be, I really could not come up with a decision whether or not I would be placing bookmark links on my entries. Currently, I still won’t be. But, if ever I will in the near future, I’d most probably use just one or two of the most popular services where you could:
More info about social bookmarking on Wikipedia with a list of more than 5 dozen social bookmarking Web sites.
