Social bookmarking is a means of saving links to your favorite pages online and sharing them with other people. Just like you can add your favorite sites to your browser’s Favorites or Bookmarks, you can add them to a social bookmarking website which you and your friends can access anytime, anywhere, even from a different computer.
Social bookmarking for niches
The biggest and most popular social bookmarking sites include Del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg, and there are probably hundreds of similar websites for you to choose from. Recently, a number of niche websites have opened, limiting the content to a particular topic. For example, Sphinn is specifically for internet marketing news, and BloggingZoom is for bloggers.
Creating a social bookmarking site
It was the arrival of BloggingZoom that made me wonder how easy it would be to set up a social bookmarking site for Japan-related news and stories. It turns out that with Pligg, an open source social content management system, I was able to set up such a site in about 24 hours. It will take a lot longer to generate some interest, but the coding side is pretty much all done.
Introducing JapanSoc, social bookmarking for Japan
JapanSoc is for all things Japanese, in English. Whether your interests lie in Anime, Japanese TV, Japanese food, the language, teaching English in Japan, Japanese news or technology, then JapanSoc is the social bookmarking site for you.
What’s the Soc in JapanSoc?
Type “define: soc” into Google and you get this nice definition that sums up the name:
Socialising and discussion of social issues.
Free registration, only takes a minute
User registration is painless and you’ll soon be able to submit any stories about Japan you find interesting. If you blog about Japan like I do, you’re very welcome to submit your own blog posts and hopefully get some extra traffic to your site.
Success depends on mass participation
For a social bookmarking site to be successful, it needs a lot of users regularly submitting, rating and commenting on articles. I think JapanSoc has great potential, but it’s nothing without users. If you like the JapanSoc concept, please take a moment to register and invite some of your friends to join. If you have a blog, please write about it and lets build a community!
Sites in the JapanSoc community
Below is a list of the first ten sites that helped to promote JapanSoc in some way or another:
- LongCountdown
- Michael McKinlay
- Nihon Hacks
- jDonuts
- Chris’ English School
- Japan Is Doomed
- What Japan Thinks
- A Typical Life
- TokyoGraph
- Xorsyst
Linking to JapanSoc
You can link to JapanSoc with either:
http://www.japansoc.com
or the following HTML code:
<a href="http://www.japansoc.com" alt="Japan Social Bookmarking">JapanSoc</a>
Here are some images you can use. Right click and save them to your computer:
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Your comments are welcome!
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!
This could be huge and the site looks great! Good work Nick!
Thanks for the praise, and also for signing up! 😀
Nick – I think that this is a great idea and have posted a blurb about the site and added it to my blogroll. I think this is really exciting and am looking forward to participating and watching this grow – Soc it to me!
Thanks Shane. I’ve added your link in this post. The ball is rolling now!
I will be putting a link back up on my site. I am trying to revamp my site so I’ll trim some stuff and add some others. Like this 😉