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The New IM Frontier:
Get Out Of The Sandbox
and
Other Applications of
Social Networking
The Internet offers a new
frontier for marketing with a tool
that has been around for
awhile, but is gaining in popularity,
social bookmarking. A
web-based service, social bookmarking is
where shared lists of
user-created Internet bookmarks are
grouped together. And
applications for this service are growing
almost daily.
“Social bookmarks can help
you get out of the sandbox,” posted
Ignat, of Honolulu, Hawaii,
on social networking forum. In other
words, social bookmarking
sites host an audience of ‘link-hungry
bloggers’ that continually
refer to the site for news they can
publish on their blogs. “So
if you have a sandboxed site, what's
better than a few hundred of
incoming links to help Google boost
your relevance?”
And that’s just one application
of social networking!
Originally developed in
April 1996 with the launch of itList.com
as a means of organizing
content using tags, social bookmarking
sites are a popular way to
group like searches, placing items in
a category, ranking their
popularity and sharing the information
as an online resource
service. Growth in only three years
resulted in many
venture-backed companies, many of which lacked
ROI (return on investment),
stunting industry growth until
recently with the launch of
the web site del.icio.us, in
September of 2003.
While improvements still
need made with social bookmarking, like
a lack of structure and
standardization; for example, with
spelling and capitalization,
for tags and keywords, there are
plenty of positive
applications. Top ones include:
- The stored resource lists are publicly accessible, great
for
online research and linking / book marking for repeat use
and
referrals.
- Social bookmarking software / scripts are based on a
different
technology than search
engines, offering a wider range of search
and classification
possibilities.
- People can subscribe to bookmarks to get helpful automatic
updates.
Service is available now for
webmasters and others interested in
setting up their own social
bookmarking sites or communities.
Hot off the press is The
Viral Socializer. With absolutely no
experience necessary, a
person can have their very own social
book-marking & tagging
service, all setup and ready to go in
about 10-20 minutes.
“I think the main interest
is for webmasters to grow their
community, or to start niche
social bookmarking,” said JP
Schoeffel, creator of The
Viral Socializer.
The script is written in php
(4.3 is enough) and MySQL. It is
packaged with a year of free
hosting plus complimentary
installation and maintenance
on hosted servers of The Viral
Socializer, an Install and
user's guide with plenty of helpful
screenshots. And all the
sections of the sites (user's part and
admin's part) are fully
explained.
“Of course there are already
a lot of these sites (social
bookmarking services),”
explained Schoeffel. “But the future of
social bookmarking is in
"Niche Social bookmarking" : be the
first to build your Niche
Social bookmarking service for your
community. And this is the
first complete script that will let
you run your own social
bookmarking service like technorati or
del.icio.us.”
For more information, visit:
http://viralsocializer.com . And
explore the new frontier of
online social bookmarking
communities!
-30-
By Diana Barnum, of http://movingaheadcommunications.com
.
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