Social Bookmarking – A Never-ending Popularity Contest

In my last post, I linked to several helpful books and articles for anyone getting started or anyone interested in SEO Copywriting. I also included a few links to some blogs that I read regularly. Since last week’s post, those nine blogs have doubled (thank you to those who gave more suggestions).

Like many of you, I use a social bookmarking site to keep my blogs nice and neat and clean for me. I go to one site and am able to read all 18 blogs without having to go the actual blog site unless necessary. Pretty convenient, right?

Well, I thought so too, until I realized just how many social bookmarking sites there are. And it seems to me that, like the blogs I read, these social bookmarking sites seem to double in a week’s time.

Here are some non-niche-specific bookmarking sites (and I’m not even including some of the major players):

del.icio.us: A social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.

Digg: A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, …

reddit: reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or
submit your own! …

StumbleUpon: The best way to discover great websites, videos, photos, blogs and more. Channel surf the internet and get personalized recommendations …

Technorati: The recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now.

Twitter: Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

While many of the above are rather general, many of the below are specifically targeting those in marketing and/or marketing-related fields:

Marketing Lens: Love internet marketing? Each day, Marketing Lens identifies the top 15 online marketing stories and blogs of the day.

Small Business Brief: Serving those in small business by providing resources, informative articles, current news, software directory and small business ideas forum.

Sphinn: The place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums.

I can’t tell you how many times I get emails asking to “sphinn” this or “fetch” that, to “digg” this or “reddit” that. It’s almost too much to handle sometimes. Then again, I do understand the want of gaining a level of notoriety through this relatively new media frenzy of social bookmarking. Who doesn’t want to be popular?

It’s a lot like high school, where you have the different cliques. Except in regard to social bookmarking and networking, rather than having the cheerleaders and the band geeks and the rebels, you have the tech geeks, the media companies, and the marketers.

This is a popularity contest.

The more friends/fans/followers you have, the more likely you are to get on the front page and be the next hot topic.