Social Bookmarking – being a good online community member

In order to be a good “online community member” we need to know for sure what are communities?  A community is a network, or group of people interested in the same things as you, and use the same tools as you. 

Wikipedia describes the functional overview of social bookmarking as: 

In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Some examples of communities:

• http://www.wikipedia.org
• Bookmark Manager
• BibSonomy
• BlinkList
• BlogMarks.net
• BlogMemes.net (Network also has French, Spanish and Portuguese version – BlogMemes.info)
• BlogLines.com
• Blue Dot
• BuddyMarks.com
• Connectedy (Converts browser bookmarks into social categories.)
• Connotea (Social bookmarking for the scientific community)
• Complore (Research Collaboration Tool for Researchers)
• del.icio.us
• de.lirio.us
• Digg
• Dohat.com
• Fantacular
• Favoor (Available in English and German)
• Furl
• GoKoDo MyBookmarks
• IndiaGram (Also has a voting system like Digg.com)
• Indiamarks (Bookmarking site dedicated to Indian community)
• Kaboodle
• Ma.gnolia
• Reddit
• Scuttle
• Shadows
• Shoppersbase (Bookmarking website for online shoppers)
• Simpy
• Smarking
• Spurl
• Technorati
• Social Bookmarking (Provides users with a personal social bookmarking sub-domain)
• Tutorialism (Bookmarking website for tutorials)
• Wink
• Yahoo! My Web (Available in many languages)
• Youtube

Getting back to being a good community member.  Do not use these sites for spamming.  Use them to get a network of people surrounding you, and the interests that you have.  Just by doing this, you will get more people interested in who you are, and how you can help them.  Provide useful articles, full of information that is neutral in view.  You will find more people visiting your blog, articles and websites by using these types of communities..

Please feel free to share and ideas or methods you may have, in regards to using the communities in a good way, but benefitting from them as well!