Social Bookmarks

Are blogs replacing regular websites? Not really. There will always be a need for well-designed web sites that have a different organization and function than the typical (or extremely atypical) blog. However, it's pretty obvious that blogging is here to stay, and webmasters will either adapt to this trend or lose market share.

This revelation came to me when I stumbled upon a site that helps bloggers add a little javascript snippet that invites visitors to Social Bookmark their pages. Social bookmarking, it seems, is the generic term for services like Del.icio.us that allow users to save their bookmarks / favorites online, then create a human-rated, searchable database from the links.

Human-rated databases aren't new, The Open Directory Project, being the most obvious example, but they have always had limitations. They attempt to impose a top-down organization on what is inherently a grassroots process. They are slow, arbitrary, laborious, and rely on volunteers who recieve little or no reward for their labors.

By contrast, social bookmarking immediately rewards users (they can access their bookmarks online) is easy to use, and generally relies upon market forces to validate links rather than arbitrary rules administered by an authoritarian editing process. I'm not one of those free-market ideologues who thinks government regulation is the root of all evil, but I happen to think the Internet is an excellent example of free-market thinking gone right.

Before the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Internet was a very limited and expensive conduit for a few ARPA/DARPA and NSF net computers to swap e-mails and files. By opening the Internet to commercial content, the network infrastructure was monetized, and its growth has been vigorous ever since.

Ironically, the ODP and most other human-mediated directories prohibit "commercial content" such as personal web-sites that have a few affiliate links to defray their direct expenses. They are glad to list university, government, and corporate sites that are far from "non-commercial" in the sense that they promote, advertise, dispense, or otherwise facilitate activities that are extremely lucrative, provided they lack a direct link between the website and the flow of cash from their users.

Given that the pool of potential editors for these directories consists primarily of small-time webmasters who want a little recognition for their sites and are immediately rejected, it's small wonder that these projects are as pathetically limited as they are. Does anybody actually use them for web-searches?

My impression is that people put up commercial-content-free sites, get them listed, and then monetize them secure in the knowledge that no one will ever know if they are listed by ODP.