The Buttons, Explained
See these buttons at the end of every post?
Cute, huh? Colorful. Trendy. Futuristic. But what do they mean? It says “Add to,” but just what are you adding it to and why might you want to do that?
These buttons represent the five most popular social bookmarking websites, where registered users save links to their favorite Internet resources (websites, articles, blogs, etc.) So far this is just like saving a favorite or bookmark in your web browser, right? But it gets better. These links are accessible from any computer that has access to the Internet. Also, each time you save a link, you give it a tag. Actually, you will probably give it more than one. Take this post, for example. If you scroll down, you will see:
Tags: bookmark, social bookmarking, tags
I have chosen these three tags to represent what this post is all about. But let’s say you want to save this post in your del.icio.us favorites. You might tag it as “buttons, Internet help, instructions.” The social aspect of social bookmarking comes into play when you share your favorites, either with a select group (family, friends, coworkers) or with everyone. If you share with everyone, some like-minded person may find you via a search for “Internet help.”
Conversely, you can find like-minded individuals through your own searches. For example, let’s say you want to find information on movies. Do you search for “movies,” “flicks,” or “cinema”? The tags people choose say a lot about who they are and how their minds work. Maybe you are a “flicks” kind of gal who thinks “cinema” people are boring and stuffy.
Here is a rundown of the five free social bookmarking sites represented by the buttons at the end of each Medium Dreams post. (Note: Rather than try to put it in my own words, I ruthlessly stole the accompanying descriptions from the referenced website):
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else’s. Use del.icio.us to:
- Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
- Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
- Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite - they’ve already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.
Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.
What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!
Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.
With Spurl.net you will never have to lose a good link again. You can search your links, notes and in fact the entire text of all the pages you’ve ever “spurled”.
You can start by uploading the bookmarks from all your computers - after that all your bookmarks will be accessible in one place.
And because thousands of other users are using Spurl.net as well, you will discover interesting links through recommendations, hot lists and more.
Furl is a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It’s your Personal Web.
Furl offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web, and recommends new Web pages that may interest you. You can also search Furl to find the best sites that other people are saving.
Furl is used for many purposes by many types of people. For travel planning. Recipe sharing. House-hunting. Medical research. Thousands of people use Furl every day to save, share and discover information that is important to them.
With My Web, you can…
- Save your bookmarks in a place where you can always find them.
- Share your bookmarks with family, friends and colleagues.
- Discover new things by browsing what’s popular or interesting to you.
Once you have chosen your bookmarking site and created an account, you simply click on the corresponding button to add a bookmark to that article. But not all sites have handy buttons at the end of each post like we do here at Medium Dreams. Not to worry: most bookmarking sites add a button to your browser toolbar when you create your account so all you have to do is click on the toolbar button when you find a page you want to bookmark. Easy peasy, nothin’ cheesy.
So get tagging, people! And, as always, feel free to leave a comment here to let me know how it goes. Easy? Hard? Confusing? So cool you wish you’d discovered tagging years ago? Of course I want to know.
Wikipedia encyclopeia entries for: del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl. (No enties found for Yahoo MyWeb and Spurl.)
Tags: bookmark, social bookmarking, tags
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POSTED IN: Blog Housekeeping
1 opinion for The Buttons, Explained
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Jun 23, 2008 at 5:04 pm
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