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What You Should Know About Social Bookmarking

If you come across a website, or even just a web page, that you want to return to at a later date you bookmark it. Before the days of social bookmarking, you would bookmark this on your computer by adding it to your ‘favorites’, or some other system that held a record on your computer.

However, let’s say you did this on your works computer, then got home and tried to remember the name of the site. You can’t, and you can’t even access your bookmark because it is on another computer. You have to wait until you have access to the computer that the bookmark is stored on. This is when you wish you had stored the information on a social bookmarking site. You can access that from any computer, since the information is not stored on your computer, but in public space on the social bookmarking site.

When you make a bookmark on your personal computer, you save the address of the website you are interested in. However, when you do so on a social bookmarking site, you save the web page address and tag it with keywords. To do this you have to register with the SB site, then you can store bookmarks in the form of URLs and also tags, or keywords, that lets you find the sites later. You can designate some bookmarks as public sites, so that others using the same keywords can access your bookmarked sites to which you have allocated the same tags.

Are the New Alexa Rankings More Accurate?

Alexa began displaying website popularity rankings in 1998, with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community. Alexa’s rankings were generated through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Over time, Alexa became the standard by which website popularity was measured.

However, one of the biggest complaints with Alexa is while it’s a useful tool, it’s not all that accurate.

Well, apparently, Alexa is trying to change that. According to information on their website, they now aggregate data from multiple sources to give users a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users. They are normalizing the traffic from their global panel to provide consistently accurate rankings for all countries.

Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits differed from those of the general population in a number of ways, and they describe some of those possible differences on their website.

Alexa claims the new rankings better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of web users.

Alexa says that they are constantly working to ensure that they provide the most useful data that they can, and will continue to fine tune their algorithms.

I tested out the “new” Alexa, before writing this article. So is it more accurate than before? To be perfectly honest, I didn’t notice any discernible difference in the way Alexa performs. Its results are still way off when compared to my own statistical data.

But your mileage may vary.

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