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The Internet offers a new frontier for marketing with a tool that has been around for awhile, but is gaining in popularity, social bookmarking. A web-based service, social bookmarking is where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are grouped together. And applications for this service are growing almost daily.

"Social bookmarks can help you get out of the sandbox," posted Ignat, of Honolulu, Hawaii, on social networking forum. In other words, social bookmarking sites host an audience of 'link-hungry bloggers' that continually refer to the site for news they can publish on their blogs. "So if you have a sandboxed site, what's better than a few hundred of incoming links to help Google boost your relevance?"

And that's just one application of social networking!

Originally developed in April 1996 with the launch of itList.com as a means of organizing content using tags, social bookmarking sites are a popular way to group like searches, placing items in a category, ranking their popularity and sharing the information as an online resource service. Growth in only three years resulted in many venture-backed companies, many of which lacked ROI (return on investment), stunting industry growth until recently with the launch of the web site del.icio.us, in September of 2003.

While improvements still need made with social bookmarking, like a lack of structure and standardization; for example, with spelling and capitalization, for tags and keywords, there are plenty of positive applications. Top ones include:

- The stored resource lists are publicly accessible, great for online research and linking / book marking for repeat use and referrals. - Social bookmarking software / scripts are based on a different technology than search engines, offering a wider range of search and classification possibilities. - People can subscribe to bookmarks to get helpful automatic updates.

SB Service

Service is available now for webmasters and others interested in setting up their own social bookmarking sites or communities. Hot off the press is The Viral Socializer. With absolutely no experience necessary, a person can have their very own social book-marking & tagging service, all setup and ready to go in about 10-20 minutes. "I think the main interest is for webmasters to grow their community, or to start niche social bookmarking," said JP Schoeffel, creator of The Viral Socializer.

The script is written in php (4.3 is enough) and MySQL. It is packaged with a year of free hosting plus complimentary installation and maintenance on hosted servers of The Viral Socializer, an Install and user's guide with plenty of helpful screenshots. And all the sections of the sites (user's part and admin's part) are fully explained.

"Of course there are already a lot of these sites (social bookmarking services)," explained Schoeffel. "But the future of social bookmarking is in "Niche Social bookmarking" : be the first to build your Niche Social bookmarking service for your community. And this is the first complete script that will let you run your own social bookmarking service like technorati or del.icio.us."

For more information, visit: http://viralsocializer.com . And explore the new frontier of online social bookmarking communities!

By Diana Barnum, president of http://MovingAheadCommunications.com Grab freebies, tips and help at http://www.OhioHelpGroup.com or call: (614) 529-9459. Freebies section at http://presssuccess.com/bookstore

About the Author

By Diana Barnum, president of http://MovingAheadCommunications.com Grab freebies, tips and help at http://www.OhioHelpGroup.com or call: (614) 529-9459. Freebies section at http://presssuccess.com/bookstore