Now that we’ve discussed what social bookmarking is and how it works, let’s take a look at what kinds of tools are out there.

The article that follows contains an analysis of the current social bookmarking websites catering to each market niche.

We’ve split them into different categories – media, mashups (combining other features besides social bookmarking), web-oriented (web top) and miscellaneous tools. Each category’s tools will be dealt with individually.

The All-Seeing Eye

There are a number of media social bookmarking websites, which when used with corporate news clips and videos, can reach a broader audience and increase traffic generation to your site.

Digg.com

This is a news aggregator whose member and viewership nearly doubles every three months. The news items with the highest number of votes make it to the front (or home) page.

Last.fm.com

A social radio website, its system creates a personalized streaming radio station based on the music you already listen to, puts it into playlists and allows them to be viewed by others.

Newsvine.com

This site is an online publisher, where readers view and comment stories written by others. They may also write their own and earn 90% of all ad generated revenue, thereby profiting on their work.

Tagworld.com

A social networking website incorporating blogs, photos, online dating, music sharing and more, everything can be tagged for easy searching.

YouTube.com

One of the most comprehensive video sharing websites on the Internet, allowing members to create, upload and watch millions of video clips. Because the videos are automatically converted to Flash, they can easily be imported into blogs or webpages.

Yahoo!

A relatively new entrant, it’s made its impact on the social bookmarking scene by taking over many existing websites including de.liciou.us, Flickr and Webjay, in the hope that it will dominate the social media bookmarking niche. It ranks results based on shared bookmarks and tags.

Mush. Lots of it.

Social bookmarking websites that combines the basic service along with a combination of others are called mashups. The following list provides a set of the most current mashup social bookmarking sites.

Bloglines.com

An online news feeder, which collects blogs and news from all over the world and displays it in one consistent, updated, multifeed mashup.

Eurekster.com

This is a search mashup site, incorporating a DIY engine which allows users to specify which sites they want searched, post the results into a blog or website and get a cut from revenue generated by any search ad clicks.

SimplyHired.com

A job search engine site, which searches through about 6 million listings on other job and corporate sites. Applicants receive emails or RSS feeds when a listing meets their requirements.

Technorati.com

A blog search engine, it searches through over 30 million blogs across the internet, displays how many other links point to the blog and incorporates an option for ranking the blog by topics. Particularly useful with corporate blogs, which can further link to corporate websites, videos, etc.

Trulia.com

Although this site is primarily restricted to California, it is expanding to other regions as well. It combines real estate agents listings with their locations on Google Maps.

The Webtop

Jotspot.com

This allows the creation of wikis (web collaborations applications, a prime example lying in Wikipedia) and online collaboration spreadsheets, particularly helpful in decentralised corporations.

30Boxes.com

A family oriented site that allows families to create social networks, upload photos, create blogs, organise events, track schedules.

37Signals.com

A useful application for online project management enables creation and sharing of to-do lists, files, performance milestones and other important metrics.

Writely.com

An online word process which enables online creation of documents, makes them visible for public use and simplifies the end result for use as a blog entry.

Miscellaneous

Jigsaw.com

This provides a business contacts database, in exchange for their own contact lists, users can access a virtual rolodex of business contacts of nearly 150,000 companies.

These tools can often collaborate with social bookmarking websites to improve your search engine rank, enhance traffic and boost your sales, reputation and revenue. In a time of consistently changing technology and cutthroat competition, it has become necessary to keep abreast of each new breakthrough.

Social bookmarking and all that it brings with it, is a forward step in the world of internet marketing, and action needs to be taken today.

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