Two Methods of Sharing Information with Guestbooks and Social Bookmarking

In general terms both of these methods of communication and information tracking are very similar. Both of them take user or visitor submitted information and display them in an orderly format for others, including the site owner, to use and read. Please read on to discover how Social Bookmarking and how Guestbooks can make your site a better place to visit.

The more common of the two means is naturally Guestbooks. There is no doubt that you have seen guestbooks on a regular basis, even if you have not used them to record your visit. Many people who run blogs, or sites with niche or clique-style members utilize guestbooks to let the site visitors leave comments of messages to the site owner, without tagging a specific page. Guestbooks are publicly displayed and intended to be read by all who visit, therefore critical information and confidential data is never recorded – or shouldn’t be. This quick method of leaving messages is quite popular in the social engineering crowd such as Myspace, Yahoo! 360 and their MSN equivalents.

On the other side of the information super highway we have social bookmarks, which also hold amounts of information submitted by site visitors. Social bookmarks however contain lists of just that, bookmarks, to other sites of interest. Social bookmarks are categorized by topic and listed in groups by those topics. The lists can then be sorted by popularity or date entered. Many social bookmarking lists are started with a collection of links submitted by the site creator, and maintained or added to by the visitors of that site. A good example of social bookmarking is found in Wikipedia, who happen to do an excellent job of sorting materials and on each topic page have the option and area for links related to that page.

If your website is an authority on a particular subject, then you may find that Social Bookmarking will help to make your site sticky – and create a batch of returning traffic to check for the latest lists in your reference section. If you maintain a blog or another form of social networking site – you will definitely find that a guestbook makes a nice addition and alternate form for communication with your visitors.

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