The new social bookmarking site is now up at http://bookmarks.driving-schools-directory.co.uk. this is a web site that will collect all good links to driving related web sites. Again the benefit here is additional backlinks for your web sites. The front page looks sparse at the moment as this will only display the most popular links / bookmarks and as there are not many currently, they will not show up. You can see current links by vlicking the “tags” or “recent” links.

The more instructors and pupils that put up their favourite links, the better the web site will work for us.

Registration up is a very quick and painless process.

To explain what a social bookmarking web site is e.g. like Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg etc. I have copied a posting from a private forum at www.trafficdomination.com - I have been given permission!

You know, I was just thinking about how many people I know understand THAT social bookmarking and tagging is a major thing right now, but don’t understand WHY people actually use social bookmarking.

Many people use thee sites for social, fun, purely entertainment and ways of interacting with their friends.

So when blogs came out and got popular, rarely did any internet marketers yearn to start a career as a “Professional Blogger” but we did look at how to USE the blogging technology to improve our overall web presence.

The same thing is with social bookmarking. A lot of people jumped headfirst into the tag and ping thing, without really knowing - or needing to know - why social bookmarks ARE such the rage.

But now that we’re building Tag Sites with the hopes of real people coming and using it, I think it’s important to make sure we understand this, because we need to customize our tag sites with the end user in mind.

I’m going to write this to you as a potential USER of social bookmarks, not as a marketer who just uses it. If I can convince you of the personal need - or at least, the personal benefit - of using social bookmarking, then you will be in a much better place as a marketer.

***What Is Social Bookmarking?
Everyone knows the ‘favorites’ or ‘bookmarks’ in the IE or Firefox browser. You find a site you want to save the URL, so you click “Add To Favorites” or “Bookmark This Site” and you’re able to come back to it whenever you want.

This is known as “Bookmarking”

So, add the word “Social” ahead of it, and you have the same functionality, with two differences:
a) The bookmark is no longer IN your browser, it’s ON a website
b) The bookmark is no longer PRIVATE, it’s PUBLIC.

The most common question I hear at this point is, “ok, but WHY do people use it? I just don’t get WHY.”

The first easy answer is, people like sharing.

But to make this more clear, here are a bunch of scenarios to show some benefits that social bookmarking offers, which can’t really be achieved in any other simple, generic way (and this ’simple’ and ‘generic’ point is important).

Ok, lets say you’re a dog lover, and you’re always finding cool, funny, interesting, helpful sites about dogs. You want to share them with all your dog loving friends. Instead of forwarding the URLs by email all the time, clogging people’s email boxes, you just stick it up on your Delicious account, and anyone who knows that you always find cool dog sites, can go to your page on delicious and see all your posts.

ALSO you can see which other people on delicious have also bookmarked the same URLs as you, so you can click on their name, and see what else they’ve bookmarked. You can find new URLs this way, that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

ALSO, imagine one day you’re at a friend’s house, you bring your dog over to play with your friend’s dog. And your friend mentions that his dog has some medical issue, and you say “OH, I just bookmarked an important article on that medical issue!” So you immediately fire up your delicious account, and give your friend that URL.

so this is one group of scenarios where you, as a dog lover, can benefit from having a delicious account.

****Having A Delicious Account For Your Business
This has started to become really big as well. One example I’ve been tracking for a while is Adobe. The company started its own delicious account and posts to it very frequently. Users of Adobe products can well benefit from going often to this URL:
http://del.icio.us/Adobe

Another Idea: Imagine you’re a speaker and consultant on a certain topic. As part of being the “guru” on that topic, it helps to stay on top of current developments. One way of doing that, and adding to your “audience” to have a delicious account where you tag all the URLs that you feel are timely and relevant to the topic you’re discussing.

So, when you give a presentation at an event, you can use certain URLs as examples to back up your points. And at the end of the talk, you can say “please go to my delicious account at this address [ ] because I update these URLs every day/week”

And it’s a way of building an audience with people just by them appreciating your ferreting. And every 10 links, or so, you could post a link “HIRE ME” or something like that which links to a page with your phone number