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Plug Your Book!
139
Once someone mentions you on del.icio.us—by bookmarking your
book, your blog, or your Web site—it’s much easier for people to find
you, and you’ll get a new stream of people coming to your site who are
already interested in what you have to say.
You can hope that people will take it on themselves to bookmark you
on del.icio.us, or you can make it easy for them. You can configure your
blog to automatically insert a small add to del.icio.us button to the
bottom of all your posts. Every reader who clicks the button casts
another vote for you. For instructions on adding these buttons, see:
Del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo in 2005.
Vertical search
Another example of a social search tool is a Swicki, which improves
and personalizes its results based on feedback from your site’s users.
For example, imagine you publish a blog about labor unions. Your
visitors frequently perform keyword searches using the word “labor” to
find what they’re looking for. A universal search for “labor” would
produce many unhelpful results—content about pregnancy, birthing,
premature births, and maternity leave.
By installing a Swicki on your site, users can customize their search
results. They can vote up the relevant results they see—those on labor
unions—and vote down the irrelevant results. The search engine learns
from its users.
Swicki is a play on the words search and wiki, implying that its value
comes from user input. The tool is provided free by a company called
Eurekster. It can also produce some additional income for your site, if
you elect to show the paid ads Swickis offers. For more information, see:
You’ll be able to design the look of your Swicki and receive a snippet
of code to insert the Swicki into your site—the entire process takes about
20 minutes.
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