Plug Your Book! by Steve Weber (i can read book club txt) 📖

This makes it easier for del.icio.us users to find relevant resources intuitively.

But here's the ultimate value of social bookmarking: the ability to share bookmarks with others, instantly tapping into collective wisdom. For example, let's imagine you want to learn about tropical fish. From the del.icio.us home page, you search for "tropical fish." Instead of finding only the most _universally popular _ sites Google shows you, on del.icio.us you find the _favorite _ resources of tropical-fish fanatics. These are the resources valued by the people with experience, the people who eat, breathe and sleep tropical fish.

Shared resources are the ones with real word of mouth, not just a certain number of links or brute-force advertising. The results are the best in the judgment of those who know the most. There's no substitute for recommendations by people who've consumed the content and found it important, useful or entertaining.

Search is what you do when you know what you're looking for. Discovery is how you find what you didn't know existed.

Smart crowds

When del.icio.us users save a Web page as a bookmark, they're "voting" for the page, much as Google's PageRank measures how popular a page is by counting incoming links. But with social bookmarks, individuals vote. With social sites, everyone votes, not just Webmasters and bloggers. Since individual Internet users vastly outnumber Webmasters or bloggers, the collective wisdom is much richer.

Once someone mentions you on del.icio.us--by bookmarking your book, your blog, or your Web site--it's much easier for people to find you, and you'll get a new stream of people coming to your site who are already interested in what you have to say.

You can hope that people will take it on themselves to bookmark you on del.icio.us, or you can make it easy for them. You can configure your blog to automatically insert a small #add to del.icio.us# button to the bottom of all your posts. Every reader who clicks the button casts another vote for you. For instructions on adding these buttons, see:

#www.publisher.yahoo.com/ social_media_tools#

Del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo in 2005.

Vertical search# Another example of a social search tool is a _ Swicki_, which improves and personalizes its results based on feedback from your site's users.

For example, imagine you publish a blog about labor unions. Your visitors frequently perform keyword searches using the word "labor" to find what they're looking for. A universal search for "labor" would produce many unhelpful results--content about pregnancy, birthing, premature births, and maternity leave.

By installing a Swicki on your site, users can customize their search results. They can vote up the relevant results they see--those on labor unions--and vote down the irrelevant results. The search engine learns from its users.

Swicki is a play on the words search and wiki, implying that its value comes from user input. The tool is provided free by a company called Eurekster. It can also produce some additional income for your site, if you elect to show the paid ads Swickis offers. For more information, see:

#www.Swicki.com#

You'll be able to design the look of your Swicki and receive a snippet of code to insert the Swicki into your site--the entire process takes about 20 minutes.

Another popular vertical search tool is provided by Rollyo, which promises to help users "roll your own" search engine. For details, visit:

www.Rollyo.com

Google is getting into the personalized-search field, too. In late 2006, it began testing Google Customized Search, which is linked to its AdSense program. You can specify the Web sites you want searched and integrate its search box and results into your own site. See:

www.Google.com/coop/cse Amazon Search Suggestions

Search Suggestions is a feature launched in 2006 enabling anyone with an Amazon account to add a bit of human intelligence to the site's search engine. On each book detail page, the link Make a Search Suggestion allows users to recommend tying a book to specific keywords. Users also explain why the keywords are relevant and will help people find the book.

One way for an author to take advantage of Search Suggestions is to link their book with relevant words and expressions that don't appear in its title or subtitle, or perhaps even the full text. For example, let's imagine you've written a book about predicting hurricanes. A year after your book goes on sale, the most damaging hurricane in history, a storm named Zelda, devastates the Florida coast. By entering the Search Suggestion "Hurricane Zelda," more buyers would find your book, even though it didn't contain "Zelda."

Once your Search Suggestion is approved, when customers search using your keywords, the book appears in search results along with your relevancy explanation.

For example, one Amazon customer submitted a search suggestion for Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Now Macbeth appears when customers search for "The Scottish Play." The relevancy explanation is shown next to a link to the book: "Theater superstition dictates that 'Macbeth' is referred to as 'the Scottish play.'"

Another example: Searching for "stolen data" now returns the book, I.T. Wars: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium.

Adding human intelligence to book searches could be a big help for finding material in niche topic areas. However, it seems a feature like this could be misused by spammers and practical jokers, so it will be interesting to see whether Amazon can police the system effectively. However, several types of Search Suggestions are prohibited:

Profanity, obscenities, or spiteful remarks.

Commenting on other search suggestions (other suggestions and their position in search results can change).

Phone numbers, mail addresses, URLs.

Availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping information.

Time-sensitive material such as interviews or concerts.

Suggestions that may be "controversial, politically or otherwise."

Digg www.Digg.com# is a news community run by amateur news buffs instead of professional news editors. Members submit items of note they've found somewhere on the Web and vote for the ones they like. A typical entry might read: "A Windmill for Your Backyard? A new, affordable wind turbine promises to help homeowners fight rising energy costs." Readers would click through to the site or blog, read the original article, then vote it up (digg it) or down (undigg).

If your book or Web site gets voted up on Digg, you can expect a crush of visitors within minutes.

Originally Digg was narrowly focused on technology news, but in 2006 it expanded into world news, entertainment, politics, and other topics. Members pride themselves on unearthing noteworthy items that might be overlooked by traditional news sources.

Items are assigned to a category such as technology, business, gaming, or entertainment. If a story receives enough votes, it's promoted to the site's home page, where it's often read by hundreds of thousands of members who often click through to the blog or Web site for further information, or perhaps blog about it themselves.

Netscape

America Online/Netscape launched a Digg-style, user-driven news site in 2006 at #www.netscape.com#.

Flickr www.Flickr.com# is a social bookmarking site focusing solely on photographs. Amateur and professional photographers upload their favorite photos to share with friends and strangers, who can assign tags and add comments. Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005. YouTube

YouTube is similar to Flickr but primarily features amateur and professional video content. After uploading, users can add comments and tags, and link to favorite videos from their own Web site. Google agreed to buy YouTube in 2006.

Popurls www.Popurls.com# is like a "greatest hits" of about 15 of the most highly trafficked social bookmarking sites, updated frequently. Listible www.Listible.com# is a site featuring lists of users' favorite Web sites resources classified by tags such as "design," "movie," "opensource," or "firefox." Lists are popular with many Web users. Users can rate the items on the list and post comments. Google, Amazon, digital content

Already dominant in the search-engine business, Google is becoming an increasingly important ally to publishers and booksellers--or a threat, depending on your point of view. A growing share of Web users use Google to find what they're searching for online, so Google is a crucial source of new visitors to author and publisher sites.

Meanwhile Google is evolving into an online marketplace connecting book shoppers and publishers, and could become a major competitor to Amazon in book retailing, both with e-books and physical books.