Social bookmarking tools – HP.com releases its own home-grown widget

You can’t browse the web these days without seeing variations of social bookmarking and tagging widgets – especially when it comes to blogs.  I’ve wondered by blogs seem to be more bookmark-worthy than other web pages but am realizing that such encouraged bookmarking on blogs might be based on the desire of bloggers to encourage links and readership more so than demand by users for such ease of bookmarking on blogs versus the usual web sites.  I personally use a social bookmarking page (Del.icio.us – not because I researched and think it’s the best but rather because I just used it one day and it stuck) for those sites I want to bookmark for access later and am realizing that in many cases the pages I bookmark aren’t blogs but just web sites that offer information, tools, resources etc. that I frequent or may want to return to later. 

That’s why we developed a social bookmarking tool for hp.com that would allow and encourage usage, not only on blogs, but other web pages as well.  You can see an implementation of it at the top of this blog (the link that says “Share/tag this post”) and on this page about the new HP 8000 MFP with Edgeline Technology.  Soon you’ll start to see it added to other pages on hp.com as well.

We created this home-grown bookmarking tool for several reasons and probably for all the same reasons that anyone else posts such a tool or direct links to social bookmarking sites on their pages: to both encourage inbound links to the site/page as well as promote the site in social communities but also to allow quick, easy bookmarking by users to pages they might want to return to at a later date.   Sure a user can bookmark or digg or furl or stumbleupon any page on the web without hosting companies providing such bookmarking widgets but it does in many cases make it simpler for the user and by having the link clearly visible – hopefully without taking too much real estate or being too glaring - it reminds the user that tagging or bookmarking is an option.

Not everyone would want or need to develop their own social bookmarking tools in house because many companies and individuals are creating widgets to allow people to add social bookmarking and tagging to their blogs and web sites.  

I have seen several variations of tools including Addthis.com which offers both a bookmarks and an RSS feed widget.

Social Bookmark Script allows you to select from several social sites which to add to your social bookmarking tool.

Manhattan Service offers their own javascript-based social bookmarking tool that allows you to post some the icons of popular bookmarking sites either side-by-side or in a vertical presentation - and in a couple of different sizes.

There are likely hundreds of solutions available and many I’ve never seen or will see.  HP chose to create its own so we could manage it centrally providing a consistent experience across hp.com.  We also wanted to ensure we could support the tool and update it at our discretion.  Finally, we wanted a small, unobtrusive way to present and encourage bookmarking options but not take up too much space on the page. 

The HP widget deployed across many more HP.com sites over the next several months but watch closely as it evolves over time to address the quickly evolving social media world out there. 

Many thanks to the team at HP who helped create the tool and also to a former colleague and friend, Michal Brito (who writes a great online marketing blog).  He helped evangelize the need for such a tool at HP.