Social Services for Writing

Every time I've written about Web 2.0, I've been describing the social aspects of using the Internet. Two components are networking and bookmarking. Unless you participate in them, the two aspects can become confused.

Last week a list member asked the value of having social bookmarking on website for promoting his writing, complaining that it was a chore to embed all the various links for deli.cio.us, Reddit, Stumble Upon, etc. His goal was to increase traffic to the site. I pointed out that you can use a service like AddThis for a compact link to a site where users can choose from among what looks like all the services on earth. (Try the button at the end of this post to see what I mean.)

Someone else wrote in, saying he was jumping on the social networking bandwagon, then offered a link to a different social bookmark generator at Social Bookmarket Script, which can produce a multi-functional insert via effort akin to mating elephants. My attempt to include an example in this post totally screwed Blogger's little display. Sorry.

You can play social bookmarking two ways, and it could also be viewed as a networking tool. If you only make the ability for readers to bookmark your post, page, website with one of the services, that's a beginning level. So is simply having a subscription yourself and marking others' items. The area of bookmarking your own work is a murky one. The possibility and appearance of abuse ought to be enough to make you restrain yourself. Sounds like a great marketing ploy at first, but think about it from other people's viewpoints, including those who offer the services.

Both marking and promoting it on your pages can be a network event of sorts, if you have the time to track down those who bookmarked yours and reciprocate on theirs. It is a kludgy, awkward way to build or participate in a social network. Tomorrow we'll look at writers using true social networking to their advantage.