Mark Pack » yahoo

Which social bookmarking services matter in the UK?

Mark Pack — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:50:54 +0000

Take a look round the internet, and you'll find stories and posts littered with icons urging you to share the content via social bookmarking services such as Digg and StumbleUpon. But take a look at the sites themselves, and it's clear that they are not only dominated by US users but also often designed with only the US in mind. For example, look at the categories available for classifying content on Digg: there's American Football but not cricket, non-US news gets lumped into the one world news category without any breakdown by other countries, and so on. The one exception is Yahoo Buzz, which does come with a dedicated UK version but has very low usage rates.

So which ones do actually matter if you are after a UK audience?

One way of judging this is to look at UK traffic to these sites, as measured by the number of people using Google to search for the name of the site. That doesn't give a total traffic figure, as people get to bookmarking sites via other means including bookmarks and typing in URLs directly, but it gives a sense of relative traffic and traffic over time.

Here then is Google's data on the volume of searches from UK internet users:

The long, sustained decline in Digg from its peak in early 2007 has continued right through the last 12 months, leaving Delicious much the most popular. Although Digg attracts more news about its activities than Reddit or StumbleUpon, either or both of them look likely to overtake Digg in the not too distant future in the UK.

Within these totals, there are different niche audiences amongst whom particular tools are much more or less popular than the average. But the overall figures and trends give a good starting point for what may matter to you.

Is fragmenting data the way to beat Google?

Mark Pack — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:50:30 +0000

The outlines of a serious challenge to Google's domination have started to take shape in the last few weeks and, rather than being based on someone doing a better search engine (as per many of the previous ones), it is based on fragmenting data on the internet.

We've already seen Rupert Murdoch's desire to take most of his news content away from Google's reach and potentially put it within the reach of just those who pay direct or those who use Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Last week's Yahoo/Facebook tie-up is fundamentally the same: enrich the data outside of Google's reach. Their deal involves sharing data between the two services for people who are users of both. So, for example, someone could log in to Yahoo and see activity from their Facebook friends then and there - without any need to go to the Facebook site.

For Facebook it potentially brings it many new users in the form of current Yahoo users. For Yahoo, the Facebook integration gives people a reason to use their email service over that from Google and thereby takes data away from Google's reach. Google can serve adverts to its Gmail customers, but can't if they take their email custom to Yahoo instead.

With Yahoo also linking up with Microsoft to use Bing to power its searches, there is a Yahoo/Facebook/Microsoft triumverate forming which could have enough strength to take data away from Google and survive.

That would have major implications across many areas of the internet, but crucially for the media it would also strengthen Rupert Murdoch's own drive to get people (or Microsoft) paying to use his news content.

Social bookmarking in the UK: Yahoo not yet buzzing

Mark Pack — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:55:46 +0000

It's rarely said but often found in website statistics: for many UK websites, social bookmarking sites such as Digg are extremely poor sources of traffic. That's because they tend to be dominated by users who are (a) American and (b) interested in technology and humour. If your site is aimed at other audiences and has other content, it suffers as a result.

The categories used on many social bookmarking sites highlights just how American-focused they are with "politics", for example, being used a synonym for "American politics". That's fair enough - if you're only really interested in an American audience.

So the news that Yahoo was launching a British version of its Buzz social bookmarking service particularly caught my attention. A system aimed at British readers and content would give stories the chance to rise to the top in a way that they often don't on American dominated sites. Its appeal is similar to that of the LibDig social bookmarking service (aimed at Liberal Democrat members and supporters): a user-baser that is more similar (but not too similar) to me should throw up more content of interest to me.

Unfortunately though so far Yahoo Buzz UK isn't exactly buzzing. At time of writing, the top story in the Today's Buzz column on http://uk.buzz.yahoo.com has all of two votes. That's relatively good going though, as the other fourteen stories on the front page have a grand total of one vote between them. The top fifteen stories in Up & Coming do a bit better, with 22 votes between them. After 10 minutes hunting round, I found one story with 19 votes, but that's the maximum I found on my travels.

In addition to low usage, the site looks to have some technical problems. I submitted one story via the Shareaholic browser plugin which seems to have gone in under my profile name, but in to the US version of the site. Therefore I can't submit the story again, but nor does it appear under my activity if I log-in to the UK version. It's half integrated, half not. Prompts to make you submit new content and offers of toolbar buttons etc. are also thin on the ground at the moment.

Conclusion? Nice idea, would love it to work, but so far it's not got any buzz going.