The initial idea of social bookmarking is a good one: To help people form associations with people of similar interests through pointing to materials that they regard as important.
However, after an initial focus on a few hubs of activity, there are more social bookmarking sites than people can possibly keep track of. That’s partly because, though the programming behind social networking sites was at first mastered by just a limited number of people, there is now open source software at Pligg, ready for relatively easy adaptation and implementation on web sites all over the Internet.
Are web hosts as ready to maintain the social bookmarking systems they install on their web hosts’ servers? The signs are not promising. On NewsBeet, one site that’s installed Pligg software, the Barack Obama News page has a few Obama items on it, but many more items that have nothing to do with Barack Obama at all. The top news items include the following headlines:
- Lindsay Lohan’s Mugshot Used In Liquor Industry Ad
- Amy Winehouse Won’t Finish Recording “Bond” Theme Song
- Robert Vesco, Fugitive Financier, Said To Have Died In Cuba
None of these entries have had anyone actually click through to view the article. Why would anyone, with the page strewn with off-topic nonsense and advertisements for Rolex watches, jobs for US Army dentists, and the like?
The failure of NewsBeet comes from two hard realities: 1) Social networking sites are only useful to anyone when they have a lot of people using them; and 2) Social networking sites are spam magnets.
I appreciate the generosity of Pligg’s open source approach, and I like the theory behind social bookmarking. It’s what happens in practice with social bookmarking that withers my enthusiasm.
What’s the difference, really, between using social bookmarking site and spamming? Most people on social bookmarking sites don’t actually do anything but point. They don’t comment. They don’t build communities. They just say, “Hey! Look there!”
That’s what puts social bookmarking sites on the low end of my scale of interest. They’re the equivalent of classified advertisements. You might look at them if you’re desperate for amusement, and they might bring some traffic, but they aren’t much of a destination themselves.
