A few weeks, ago, BBC News added some social bookmark links to their website. At the bottom of every page, the graphic above appears, together with some explanatory text of what a social bookmark website is.

Now, for a while, I used Furl, and now mainly use Google bookmarks to store my own bookmarks. And yes, I still use Del.icio.us too. But I don’t see Furl or Google bookmarks there at all.

Elsewhere on bbc.co.uk, I don’t see any links on things like this weekend’s Reading and Leeds Festivals, nor the excellent Seven Ages of Rock site, which is otherwise replete with links to Wikipedia, Flickr, Last.FM etc.

Above is the bar you’ll find on many Virgin Radio website pages - for example on its V Festival. At first glance, ‘bookmark this’ and ‘add this’ are slightly confusing; ‘add this’ actually refers to the RSS feed within that particular page, whereas clicking ‘bookmark this’ used to bring a nice dropdown of particular sites, but appears now to open a new page. This gives the correct links to add this page to any social bookmark system, and also tells a user how to bookmark it to their computer if they wanted to.

The Telegraph also links to an arbitrary list at the bottom of their pages; this time without any images or icons. They’re linking to NowPublic, I notice.

Finally, the New York Times links to a few, including a special appearance of Newsvine, all behind a dropdown.

There really ought to be a better way; and it’s good to see that The Share Icon Project is attempting to do for these types of links that the RSS feed icon has so successfully done; to give one little icon, and from there to link to a page which contains my favourites, not just the bloke at the BBC/Virgin/Telgraph/NYT who happened to code the service in the first place. A nice well-used icon should also ensure that people are able to use this on more pages, since you shouldn’t need a ton of space - or even, in time, any explanation, for what the icon means.

Of course, there’s a question-mark about how useful these links are. I’d never use those buttons, preferring to use my delicious toolbar (or Google toolbar). But, at the bottom of a page, they certainly jog your memory. Perhaps they might be better marked: “Would someone else find this page useful?”

But in any case, some consistency about how we link to social bookmarking websites would be a good idea. I don’t think we can go far wrong with the ’share’ icon. Which is why I’m now using it; and if you agree, I’d urge you to, as well.

Tags: social_bookmarking, standards, web | Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.