Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

If you care about web promotion of your web site, if you post articles titled “10 steps to do XYZ” or “ABC in 3 minutes”, if you want your blog posts to be bookmarked across all social networks, if you follow your incoming links with more attention than your personal hygiene, then here is a tip for you.

Look at the limitations that social bookmarking services impose on their users.  Make sure that you provide a quick way to bookmark your site with sufficient information which is within those limitations.

Take del.icio.us for example. Which limitations does it impose on the users?  There are a few, but the main one is the length of the description.  Whenever I bookmark your web site, I can only post 255 characters of the description.  This is too much and this is too little.

This is too much if I will have to type my own description.  I don’t have the time to describe all the web sites that I bookmark.  For many of them, I don’t even have any idea of what to write, since I bookmark the web site to check it out later… So whenever I bookmark a web site, I look around for a quick way to generate that description.  And the easiest and fastest way is always a copy-paste.

That’s where that description length limitation becomes too small.  Most web sites have an “About” page these days.  But it’s too long for a description.  A couple of paragraphs could do, and I can almost always find those paragraphs to copy-paste, but they almost never fit into 255 characters.  That’s where you come in.

First of all, make sure that there is a piece of text, less than 255 characters long, that gives me an idea of what the article is or post or page or web site is about.  Secondly, make sure that I can find that piece of text easily.  Make it bold.  Put a border around it.   Slap a “Synopsis” or “About” or “In brief” label somewhere nearby.  You can even go as noisy as “del.icio.us users might want to use this as description: …”.

Why would you want to go into all that trouble?  Because this will help me, your visitor, to keep my bookmarks organized and annotated.  I will be able to find this bookmark much faster later on.  And that means that chances of me coming back, of me sending this link to someone else, or blogging about it are much higher.  And that is what you, as a web promoter, want.  Isn’t it?

I’ve been using Gmail for bookmarking for quite some time now.  It works, but not as good as specialized bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us .  So, I’m moving many of my bookmarks from Gmail to del.icio.us .  A few minutes later, I see them coming up in my Google Reader subscriptions (I’m subscribed to my own feeds as well for easier searching).  I look through them and think “these are some cool links!  I should add them to my del.icio.us bookmarks.”.  Puzzled…

I have posted the 1,000th bookmark to my del.icio.us account today.

Here is my bookmarking evolution.

At first, I wasn’t using bookmarks at all. I didn’t have my own computer,so there was no point. And there were only a handful of sites that I was visiting, so, again, there was no point.

Later I go myself a computer and bookmarks started to multiply. They were all in one folder, and then they grew out of it, so I had to create some sort of hierarchy.

Then I got myself another computer and an office workstation. My bookmarking rate decreased since I didn’t have any means of synchronizing bookmarks between computers. I was adding bookmarks slower and not using them at all. My favourite sites were still in my memory and not computer’s.

The need for a good bookmark manager was growing though. I wrote a few scripts that synchronized my data between computers, but it was still a pain. Too often the needed machine was offline…

Then came Google. Somehow it stopped the whole bookmarking process. And I wasn’t the only one. Many many many people forgot about bookmarks altogether. Finding it again was so much faster and simplier with Google that everyone were doing just that.

With Google and the progress of the technology the Web grew fast. Lots of amazing stuff got published on the web. Finding something specific is still simple. But there are whole bunch of these things that you see once and then forget about them, until you need them long way down the road. By the time you need them, you don’t even remember what exactly they were - just some vague association. Googling for something vague doesn’t work very well. At least for me. So the need for something else was growing again. Google was good, but it wasn’t enough.

And so it came - del.icio.us. I was so glad to find! From the start my usage of it was pretty extensive. I was posting lots of stuff, tagging, re-tagging, importing and exporting, building statistics, and doing all sorts of crazy things. It was exactly what I needed.

And it still is.

I just woke up and logged in. News time. I navigated to BlogLines, but it greeted me with “There is a problem with the database. Please try again later”. I thought - “yeah, well, that’s perfect time to read something that I’ve bookmarked a long time ago and never had a chance to come back to”. So I tried to load my del.icio.us bookmarks. Nope, no chance. I got only “del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we’ll be back in one hour.”…

Oh, my! What’s going on? Who’s next? Slashdot? Google? I rushed to check both of them, but they seem to be OK. Good. I’ll have something to read for the next hour.

This time I am one of the last people to discover the new feature - del.icio.us inbox. And I will write about here anyway, because new people are born every day and eventually they will grow up old enough to need to know about it. And when they do, there is a chance that they will read about it here and not on every other page on the web.

So, del.icio.us inbox is a sweet feature that allows you, as a user, to subscribe to bookmarks made by certain other users, or marked by certain tags, or both. From now on, you don’t have to subscribe one billion RSS feeds to find out what’s hot in “photography”, or “parenting”, or what your wife has been bookmarking, or what your sysadmin has learned about Linux. You can get all these in one nice RSS feed from your del.icio.us inbox.

It’s easy to ignore the rest.