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.

SB Service

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!