In this paper, I'm simply going to list the 30 largest social bookmarking sites on the world wide web, as per October 2008.

You may ask yourself why you even should look at this in the first place.

Well, I don't think we really have the choice to ignore the internet any longer, and it is changing fast. Social bookmarking is   just one very important aspect of this.

 Some of you may well be surprised at the fact that facebook is not part of this list. There is a very good reason for this. Facebook is a SOCIAL NETWORKING system. Here we're talking BOOKMARKING SITES.

 We'll cover the social networking sites later on.  

I'll give you all the statistics, and then,  I will explore each site individually over the next few weeks.

 Each site has it's own demographic of users and there are some really interesting statistics that will help you determine if and when you should use a particular site.

These social bookmarking sites provide an important contribution to improving your visibility as well as growing your credibility worldwide, which is the basis of good and effective marketing.

 Wikipedia has a really good description of what social bookmarking is:

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

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.^[1]

Why would that be important and why should you care?

 Lets take a "real" life example. Think of a social bookmarking site as a centre of influence. The more people think as an authoritative source (in your area of expertise) the more credibility and therefore business you get.

 As social bookmarking in effect gives people the opportunity to "vote" for what you have to say. The more positive votes, the greater your credibility.

 The social bookmarking sites are viewed by Google and other search engines as authority sites, because human beings are voting for the quality of the content.

 The more people who vote for your content, the better your rating - the higher your perceived credibility.

 And from a search engine point of view, the more people that vote for you on a particular topic, the more important your website must be.

 This means, that Google will rank your site higher than your competitors.

 I'm just scratching the surface here with this explanation. There are a number of very significant nuances, which we cover in our consultations, to get a major ranking for your website.

 These are the things that you need to look out for:

 382,792,751 Inbound links: simplistically speaking is a "vote" for your content contribution, the more inbound links you have, the better your website is ranking in Google. Just like real life the more authoritative the source, the more weight the referral has.   In web terms this means that a link coming from a site like Digg with millions of members - has more weight than say www.nooneknowsme.com.

•  http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/  22,578,945 monthly visitors: The Unique Visitors metric only counts a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. Unique Visitors are typically used to determine how popular a site is.
  
• http://www.quantcast.com/digg.com monthly 10,300,000 visitors: This really is quite amazing. These statistics provide you with an overview as to who the digg audience is. It does list demographic, geographic, business as well as the lifestyle of the members in digg. This is great in regards to figuring out if the site fits your profile of the target market.

2. Alexa ranking 124: this site is 124^th most visited on the web according to Alexa. (This is not necessarily reliable, we explore this topic in our consultations with you.)
3. Page ranking 8: the higher the page ranking the greater the authority Google believes the site has

 But lets get stated with the top 30. 

Number 1: 

www.digg.com

Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.

Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems. (wikipedia November 2008)

Much of the explanations above will remain the same throughout the whole series on social media. I'll include it each time so that you have ready reference.