Blog homeOne of my “daily routine” sites is the del.icio.us homepage (now owned by Yahoo). Although I don’t use their service for bookmarking purposes I find that they often have, in their top 12 listing, a website or article that I will find interesting.
I have once got to 2nd on the delicious homepage listing….. for a web based application that I developed…. so I know what it takes (that was just following Techcrunch reviewing it). I remember that when I got to 2nd on the page (which updates every hour) I was at a client’s office - and had to ask a developer there to screenshot it! Thanks Paul (he always complains that he is never mentioned on this blog!)
Anyway, the other day, I was paying one of my regular visits…. and there was a UK based tour operator at the top of the list. Wow - that is pretty good going!
The page that hit the top was from Direct Villas Florida - link to the listed page - link to their homepage
Direct Villas Florida are a UK based Florida villa rental company (yeah - the name is a bit of a giveaway). This is a fairly competitive sector (as most are in travel) and was interested to see how they are using their blog to get themselves known.
Perky’s Bat Tower (Florida)
The answer is for one of their blog posts they listed 12 interesting images of structures in Florida that were either unfinished or abandoned. I am sure they must have done something else to promote this page (than just publish it) - but in essence the top page was just a gallery of images.
Go to the page now (worth 30 seconds of you time!)
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Of course that is until users find those results are just a matter of smart software trickery: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/messing-with-digg.html (Digg, but I’m sure the same stuff holds for delicious).
It’s amazing to me how many people actually still think results on sites like digg, su, delicious are natural and not the result of people getting together and abusing those systems via software or arrangements with other webmasters (heck, apparently you can just buy your way to the front page if you like…).
Hi Sam
The interesting part of delicious is that mainly the “personal benefit” of using such a service is more important than the “network effect”. Hence I tend to think that delicious is more natural than Digg is (you tend to get tools and services to the top of Delicious as well as pages).
The “personal benfit” from digging isn’t the same as for bookmarking via delicious…… hence people digg for all sorts of reasons. I am pretty sure that people book mark via delicious in order to remember the link for the future (or share the link with co-workers in a shared delicious account)
I don’t mind how the top of Delicious is formed…. as the results are informative for me anyway!
Delicious + 1
Now you get a grumble for mentioning me for something so useless!
Similar to checking delicious every day take a look at http://popurls.com/