BlinkList - Del.icio.us with Digg Ranks
March 18, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Social Networking
Ever since I started really looking into the potential of social networking sites to improve online business, I’ve been compelled to test out many of the new competitors who’ve stepped into the ring. While juggernauts like MySpace and Digg may have a stranglehold in the arena, they also have many problems that could be the opening a competitor needs to get their foot in the door.
One of the somewhat newer players to the game is a site known as BlinkList. If I were to describe the site in a single sentence, I would say it’s the combination of Del.icio.us and Digg with a slight twist. Users of the site build their own bookmark lists, very similar to Del.icio.us complete with description, title, and their own set of tags. Where the twist comes into play is that BlinkList treats each person who saves a bookmark to their list as the equivalent of what one Digg would be. So, if six people save an article, then the article recieves six “blinks.” Any user commiting the link to their saved list is essentially endorsing it as an article other users might want to read. The ultimate result of this sort of distrubuted bookmarking is that articles are promoted to the front page based on their bookmark popularity. This is nearly identical to the Digg model except for the fact that the promotion of the article comes from different users independantly bookmarking a site in addition to them seeing it in the list of popular posts and choosing to click it.
I’ve been using the site for a couple of weeks now, and I have found BlinkList to be a very promising resource for the submission of articles. I found one of our posts, The Developer Cheat Sheet Compilation, submitted independant of my efforts and there seems to already be a large body of users submitting and promoting articles. The website is very slick and clean, with a lot of AJAX based user interface design that makes it really easy to navigate.
One thing I really found interesting, as well as promising for new bloggers, is their listing of most recent bookmarks available on the main page. This list updates very quickly, but an article is promoted to the top of it EACH TIME someone adds it to their profile. Unlike Digg where your new post can quickly be buried from the main page, never to be seen again, the more popular your article becomes, the more chances it has to be seen by readers of the site. A very nice improvement over the Digg model.
Overall, I think this site has a lot of potential both as a place to promote your articles and also as a place to find and read interesting posts. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on BlinkList and adding it to my list of go-to resources for promoting new Bookmark Bliss posts. If you’re interesting in trying it out, you can submit any of our articles to BlinkList by clicking on the share this link at the bottom of every post.
If you’ve had any experiences with BlinkList, I would love to hear about it, good or bad. I think for now, I’ll keep playing around and see what other interesting ideas they have in store.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
Welcome
Make Money
3 people have left comments
Sounds pretty interesting! I see lots of blog are including Blinklist buttons on their sites now.
I’ve been playing with Blinklist for a short time as well and so far so good - a small but consistent amount of traffic. Contrast that with some of the other social networking sites that drive a lot of traffic in a short time and then die off.