What is social bookmarking? More
importantly, how is it relevant to the fashion industry.
First of
all, social bookmarking has nothing to do with your mothers book
club. Although you may have pictured in your mind a group of
old ladies sitting around sipping tea and helping one another
mark the pages of their mutually selected novel, this is simply
not the case. The social book marking that is referenced in
this article is entirely an online phenomenon. This practice is
completely internet based and has nothing to do with either hard
cover books nor paperbacks. Even if the book club was reading a
fashion book
(and reading as a group in a social
environment), it would still not be considered social fashion
bookmarking...
Social bookmarking is actually a method for users of the
internet to organize web pages. You may be familiar
with "bookmarks" from your internet browser.
Essentially, it is a way to save web pages into a folder
deemed to be your favorites. The idea is to place a web
site or web page of interest to you into a folder so
that you can easily find it again in the future.
Typically, when you use the bookmarking method (add to
favorites) on your web browser, the web address will be
saved and only you should be able to view what
is in your folder. Social bookmarking has taken this a
step farther and allows you to designate if you wish for
other people on the internet to be able to view your
bookmarks (view your favorites). It is social, because
others can interact with the data (level of interaction
will vary).
The social bookmarks are usually public but they can
also be saved privately or shared only with a specific
group of people. Some systems may allow for you to
create a combination where you can share some of your
favorites and hide others. Some systems will work in
conjunction with a social network so that the network
members can contribute to the tagging functions. By the
way, although it is not a social network, if you want to
find the worlds best "business to business" network, you
should check out the
Fashion Industry Network.
If
your bookmarks are public, they can often be viewed by
category, alphabetically, chronologically, or found via
search engine technology. This will depend on the
social bookmarking system or service that you are
using. Most systems allow internet users to organize,
store, search, and manage (update, edit, or delete)
bookmarks. It is important to note that most systems
would allow you to manage your own bookmarks. You would
typically not be able to update, edit, or delete
bookmarks created by other users. However, some systems
may allow for administration by more then one user.
Here is a more technical way of describing the
concept... Bookmarking is often done with the help of
metadata (keywords) typically in the
form of tags that collectively become a
folksonomy (social tagging). In a
social bookmarking system, users save hyperlinks (url's,
links to web pages) and have the ability to view or
share the bookmarks via a web browser (viewing on the
internet).
The tag or keyword is an essential
aspect of bookmarking. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or
term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata
helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by
browsing or searching. Tags are selected by the item's creator
or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which
many users tag many items (such as a social bookmarking site),
this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. If that sounded
too complicated, here is an example in English. If I want to tag
a website page that helps me shop for a sexy black dress (for my
wife not me...), I may wish to create three unique keywords
(tags) for the page. I would probably tag the page with the
three words "sexy", "black", "dress". If the system allowed for
using more then one words separate by commas (phrases), I might
try these three, "sexy black dress", "sexy dress" and "black
dress".
If you were curious about who
pioneered tagging, I believe it may have been the
company founded in 2003 called del.icio.us which is
now called Delicious. If you wish, you can view
some of
Apparel Search
on Delicious. Unfortunately, we
have not had time to add many of our pages to
Delicious, but we added a few as an example.
Delicious helped pioneer tagging and may have
actually coined the term social bookmarking (not
positive, but that is what I read).
As
read at Wikipedia April 28, 2009, "Most social bookmark
services encourage users to organize their bookmarks
with informal tags instead of the traditional
browser-based system of folders, although some services
feature categories/folders or a combination of folders
and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated
with a chosen tag, and include information about the
number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social
bookmarking services also draw inferences from the
relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or
bookmarks. Many social bookmarking services provide web
feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists
organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become
aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and
tagged by other users. As these services have matured
and grown more popular, they have added extra features
such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability
to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing
of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social
network features"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_bookmarking).
One of the primary benefits to social bookmarking is
that the tags or keywords are added by humans. People
read the content of a web page and then decide the words
that best describe what is found on the page. This is
helpful to the user when they wish to find the page
again. It also helps other users if they have made
their bookmarks public. Although the fact that the
keywords are selected by humans is a positive aspect.
It unfortunately, is also a negative. After all, people
do make mistakes.
Overall, social bookmarking is an interesting method for
internet users to help organize the web.
At
this point, I think we have had enough discussion about
the boring aspects of how social bookmarking
functions. Boring you was not the initial purpose of
this article. The goal of this article is to explain
the relationship between "Fashion" and "Social
Bookmarking". OK, here goes.
In
the past, newspapers and magazines had been very
fashionable methods to educate the world on fashion
relevant matters. However, as with all trends, things
change... The winds of technology have blown thru town
and we have found ourselves in the age of the
"internet". Most of what we have known in the past
regarding how to disperse information has essentially
flown out the window. As with all other industries, the
Fashion Industry,
must adapt to the new trends in technology. Hence, we
must embrace the internet and find new ways to spread
our fashion wings and share our stylish ideas with the
world.
In
order for me to express to you my thoughts on fashion, I
first must create a method for you to find my words of
wisdom (I guess it worked, because you are undoubtedly
reading this). One way to share your thoughts on
fashion is to create a
fashion website. After you have the
site set, you certainly want to submit the url (website
address) to
leading
search engines
such as Google. Can you guess another thing that
fashion website creators should do??? Well, I certainly
hope a bell went off in your head... Yes, you should
submit your web pages to social bookmarking websites.
Although I am making this suggestion to
fashionistas,
fashion blog
owners, clothing stores, and every other type of fashion
website owner, I must be honest and say that I have not
really done well practicing what I preach. I created an
account with Delicious, Furl, and Ma.gnolia a long time
ago but really have done very little with it. Only
re-discovered the concept a week or two ago. I have
started adding a few more pages of
Apparel Search to
Delicious. I may move onto the others in the future (if
I have the time...)
The moral of this story is that if you wish to promote
your fashion business, you need people to find your
company. One of the many ways to achieve this goal is
to take advantage of
social bookmarking your fashion website pages.
This is certainly, not the only avenue that you should
explore. But it is certainly not something to be
completely over looked.
By
the way, another good way to get the word out about your
fashion site is to submit a
fashion press release.
If you submit a release directly or if you go thru a
fashion pr
company, you can submit articles to Apparel Search for
possible publication in our
fashion articles
section.
Make sure you tag responsibly... Also, don't drink and
drive.
A
few social bookmarking websites:
Delicious,
Diigo,
Stumbleupon,
Digg,
and
Reddit.
Getting more follows is
important to people interested in social media.
You may want to visit our
get more follows page to learn more about the
concept of increasing followers on social media
platforms.
Written by ML42809
Viral Marketing
Apparel Search on
Facebook
Fashion Industry Network on Facebook
Apparel Search on
Youtube
Apparel Search on tumblr
Apparel Search on
Delicious
Apparel Search on Pinterest
Social Fashion
Commerce
|
 |
Learn about
Viral
Marketing For The Fashion Companies.
Learn about
in-text advertising methods that can be used by the fashion industry.
Learn about
Tiny URL's.
You may also find interest in a new term
created by Apparel Search called Fashion
Tags. |