2008-08-09 Social Bookmarking Overload

Permalink Trilogy

Social Bookmarking

It only got truly popular in the last few years, but social bookmarking is more than a decade old already.

The idea appeals in several ways. The bookmarks do not depend on your browser, platform or the particular computer you are using. The tagging and ranking of bookmarks help you find interesting high-quality sites discovered by others.

The tags are not standardised, and social bookmarking sites are abused as yet another another way spam URLs, but these disadvantages have not stopped the popularity of social bookmarking sites.

viral marketing

The social bookmarking sites use a viral marketing technique. Their favicon serves as bookmark icon to use with links that let visitors bring up their bookmarking dialog with just one click. Using these bookmark icons shows how hip you are, and making it easy to bookmark your page won’t hurt your Google PageRank.

bookmark ribbon

Once you start putting up an icon for the social bookmarking site you use, you’ll be putting up icons for other social bookmarking sites. Soon, there are so many tiny icons below each post on your blog, that they form a festive colourful icon ribbon not unlike a multinational flag string. For lack of any accepted term, I will now call that the bookmark ribbon.

volatile hipness

Bookmark ribbon hipness is volatile. To remain truly hip the bookmark ribbon must reflect your in-crowd status by featuring the very latest icon, preferably one for a bookmarking service That’s still in closed beta. Your inbox should be overflowing with emails from friends begging for a referral, so that they can have a bookmark ribbon as hip as yours. Staying hip is hard work, you need to hunt down those hot new bookmarking start-ups to add yet another icon to your bookmark ribbon, to keep it growing. The bigger your bookmark ribbon, the hipper you are - or not?

convenience

One argument in favour of bookmark ribbons is that the ribbon is a convenience for readers, but that is not a very convincing argument. To try and use the ribbon, readers need to scan it for their favourite service (are they ordered alphabetically, by popularity, by age or as random as date added?), and then click that icon - and that is the good case, if you actually feature their favourite service in your bookmark ribbon. If their favourite bookmarking service is not featured in your bookmark ribbon, you just wasted five second of their life.
The simple truth is that readers already have some toolbar button they click for fast bookmarking. That button is a bigger click target, it is in a fixed position, they know it is there and they know it actually leads to the bookmarking service and not to something else, so why would any bookmarker ever opt to scan your bookmark ribbon instead?

bandwidth-hogging clutter

A bookmark ribbon may seem festive to some, but many find it ugly, and it is most definitely clutter. What’s more, it’s bandwidth-hogging clutter.

A small icon is perhaps just a few hundred bytes, but if you have a few dozen of them, it adds up to say 10 kilobytes. Each one has a link associated with it, each easily between fifty and a hundred characters long, so that is say another two kilobytes. That’s a dozen kilobytes per visitor per article. Free advertising for the bookmarking services that you pay for.

The exact numbers do not matter much, what really matters is that the size of the bookmark ribbon is often more than the article it appears under. For a text-based blog, especially those that merely post two lines of text to go with some link they found, a bookmark ribbon can easily double, triple or quadruple the bandwidth needs of the site.

begging for bookmarks

All those bookmarking links invite the reader to bookmark the post, suggest they bookmark it, request that they bookmark it; if you like this, bookmark it please. That is begging for bookmarks; oh, please, bookmark me, I am desperate for more hits, pretty please.

bragging

Or perhaps is it not begging, but bragging: this piece is so awesome, that you must be eager to bookmark my wonderful writing right now. I knew you’d like it, so here are the links to do so.

campaigning for links

Begging or bragging, it sure is campaigning for links. Perhaps a few readers do bookmark a page because of the icons, but just how many readers decide to not bookmark it, because they feel insulted by the bookmark ribbon? Putting a bookmark ribbon on your article is just as insulting as "back to the top" links every few paragraphs. Your readers know how to use their browser, they know how to use their bookmarking service, and are quite capable of making a bookmark decision without your prompting.

The social pressure you put on visitors to bookmark may also make them decide to not bookmark even, even if they would have otherwise; giving in to your campaigning for links might make them feel cheap. Worse, they might end up looking cheap to sharp observers, including increasingly smart search engines. Better not to bookmark if the author is begging for it.

stop campaigning, start writing

Here is a tip: stop campaigning, start writing. Do not brag, do not beg, do not insult your readers, but trust their judgement and ability to create a bookmark. Write something worth reading, and the links will come.

social bookmarking overload

Those bookmark ribbons are social bookmarking overload. There are too many ribbons with too many icons cluttering up web pages. It is gratuitous page noise, gaudy visual pollution, bandwidth overload and plain insulting to your readers.

To cater to the desire for bookmark ribbon hipness, Peter Harkins created a WordPress plug-in called Sociable (now maintained by Joost de Valk). He also wrote a piece stating that “lots of links to social bookmarking sites at the end of your posts are ugly” more than two years ago already.

He claims that his plug-in drives traffic, but also admits that “The other big default is to show all SBS [Social Bookmarking Services] icons, and it’s getting worse and worse. New SBS contact me about once each week to get added, so pretty soon the default is going to pass from humorous overkill into a sprawling mess. (And let me parenthetically tip my hat to the folks who’ve realized it’s intentionally silly.)”.

permalink

It is tempting to think that we can do without any bookmarking links at all, but the web stopped being that simple many years ago. Bookmark links do serve a purpose. If people simply bookmarked whatever URL the browser displayed in its address bar, they’d often experience link rot.
The permalink is the solution for that. Putting a permalink on your articles is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It provides readers who want to make bookmark with the right link for doing so. It is a small service that keeps them from having to guess your URL naming system.

Get rid of the bandwidth-hogging clutter. Once you have a permalink, you do not need a bookmark ribbon. You need just one permalink, and just one icon. That's the first step to Permalink Best Practice.