How to Use Social Bookmarking in Catholic Web Site Development

Introduction

The new, improved web ( Web 2.0 technology), began about the year 2004. One of the new features that developed from this new technology environment is social bookmarking. With Web 1.0 technology, many knew bookmarks as web pages that they have saved as favorites in their internet browser. These bookmarks were meant only for personal use - web sites regularly revisited for news, information, and work-related activities. Now, with the evolution of the Web to Web 2.0, bookmarking became more "social". People now share their favorites with others through social bookmarking web sites. Also, with the trend towards real-time searching and publishing, many also use social bookmarking to publish their bookmarks in real-time.

An advantage for bloggers

With a blog, you may already know of the atom or rss feed incorporated in your blog template, so that anyone wanting to subscribe to your blog content, can easily do so with their feed reader or news aggregator. Also, you can place a social bookmarking button in your blog so that when visitors stumble upon the blog through a search query, they can easily bookmark your blog site with their favorite social bookmarking site. This type of sharing is easy because it helps others bookmark only a web page instead of having to subscribe to a feed that regularly delivers content to their feed reader. A social bookmarking button placed in your blog has the potential of doubling, or even tripling the visitor traffic to your blog site.

How to place a social bookmarking button in your Catholic site and blog

Many web site developers and bloggers are using the free social bookmarking button from AddThis.com. The script this site provides is free. All you need to do is to register at the site. Once registered with your own username and password, you will receive a confirmation message in your email inbox informing how you can access the code for one of their social bookmarking buttons. There are several formats for these social bookmarking buttons. Select the one you prefer, click, and then copy the script and paste it in your site or blog template. Once in place, try bookmarking to see if it works.

If you open the page in your browser, the button will look something like below:

AddThis.com social bookmarking button

This AddThis.com button has about 43 sites all in all incorporated in their bookmarking service. Four of my favorites (delicious.com, Diigo.com, Facebook, and MySpace) are also included. As their service also includes social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, your site readers can easily bookmark a page in your site or a post in your blog and share it with their network of friends.

Optimizing social bookmarking benefits

To optimize the benefits of social bookmarking, one good and wise strategy is to engage in social bookmarking activities yourself, and share the excellent and interesting web pages and web sites you stumble upon on the Web. Two social bookmarking sites I highly recommend are: delicious.com and diigo.com. Bloglines also has some social bookmarking features through its "clip blog" and "save articles" functions. It is a good and very versatile site for web developers: it offers also free blog hosting and a feed reader service for subscribers. Bloglines is my favorite three-in-one web developer tools site.

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Dennis Emmanuel Cabrera
Web Developer Methods for Catholics
www.c-web-developer.net
My Main Catholic Blog
www.c-internet-mission.net