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Kenneth Musante is a writer and technology whiz from the heart of Central Wisconsin. He joined ADOTAS in June 2005, where he writes news and editorials. He's particularly fond of new and innovative ideas like podcasting and online video.

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Del.icio.us Marketing

Written on
January 25th 2006
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by Kenneth Musante  |
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Anyone who’s anyone in the techno-savvy world has heard of social bookmarking service del.icio.us. It’s a spartan but full-featured link-sharing service that lets you save your favorite links, categorize them by tags, access them from any computer connected to the Internet, and share them with the world. And in case you were living under a rock last December, you probably also noticed that del.icio.us was purchased by Internet giant Yahoo. When Yahoo picked up del.icio.us, it had around 300,000 registered users. Even though recent stats have not thus far been released from either company, the number can only have gone up because of the association.

Earlier this month, Darren Rowse of the professional blogging blog, ProBlogger wrote a short post that listed some of the characteristics of sites that make it to the top of del.icio.us’s Popular Pages section. While del.icio.us is not a search engine, it is something that even non-registered users can and do use to discover new sites on the Internet. Because all the links archived by the site are gathered and tagged by honest-to-goodness human beings, some of the links found there can actually be more relevant than search engine results, depending on what you’re searching for.

Something that struck me about Darren’s list was that it wasn’t a treatise on how to reach the top of the del.icio.us popular page, but on a broader note, it described the sort of pages that people like to stick in their back pocket and save for later. The more people who want to save a link for later, the more people that link is exposed to on del.icio.us –just like an SEO ranking.

But could a social sharing site like del.icio.us be used for marketing? You bet! Now that Yahoo’s pumping money into it, as long as they don’t destroy the user experience, the user-base can only increase.

Since del.icio.us is not driven by an automated search index, you have to learn the rules of people again; publish the things that people like, and encourage them to bookmark your content. Instead of an SEO site rank or buzz in the blogosphere, you have to generate linkage. At the very least, a del.icio.us link to your site will earn you a point or two with the traditional search engines. And while del.icio.us marketing is probably not something you want to blow your entire online marketing budget on right now, it’s at least something worth keeping an eye on.



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Reader Comments.

I was under the impression that del.icio.us pages were not indexed by any search engines and therefore an entry in del.icio.us has no effect whatsoever on search engine rankings.

Check the robots.txt file on del.icio.us…

Posted by Laurence Gordon | 2:19 pm on January 26, 2006.

I started using digg a while ago, but I became a little infuriated by some of the meaningless comments on the articles, as well as by a relative inability to control some of the content. I’ve heard that digg is thinking about expanding to other types of news outside of technology, but for me it’s too little too late.

I’ve found a website (http://reddit.com) that has totally replaced digg for me because it found a unique way to solve all these problems. I’m not a del.icio.us member, but some of their complaints seem to mirrot the issues I had at digg. I found many of these issues have been addressed at reddit. At reddit, you can vote articles both up AND down, and you can do the same for comments! It also trains a filter to learn personally relevant material. If you’re interested in sites like digg or del.icio.us, I would recommend you check out reddit as well.

Posted by Connor Daine | 10:46 pm on January 29, 2006.

Yeah, as far as I know Google indexes del.icio.us sites:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Adel.icio.us&btnG=Google+Search

Posted by Kenneth Musante | 1:14 pm on January 30, 2006.

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