Newspapers 2.0: Social Bookmarking links on British newspaper sites

Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking at the Web 2.0 features on British newspaper websites.

One of the main areas that I was interested in was to find out which newspapers were providing social bookmarking widgets in the way of buttons and links to services like Digg and del.icio.us.

Of the eight newspapers that I reviewed, I found that only two, The Sun and The Independent, seemed to have resisted the temptation to add these kind of buttons anywhere on their site.

In some ways this seems strange for The Sun, who over the last year or so have generally been quite progressive with embracing new web technologies and the user-generated and social aspects of the internet - even if they do still insist on disabling the user's right-mouse button with JavaScript, like it is 1997.

As well as The Sun and The Independent, The Guardian has tended to stay aloof from this phenomena - only their "Comment Is Free" off-shoot sports any kind of social bookmarking links. It does score bonus points though for being the only newspaper blog-style site so far to link out to Technorati.

This emphasises one of my main findings in this area - that a lot of newspapers are not consistent about whether they have these buttons or not.

The Daily Mail, for example, has them on stories in their technology, sport and entertainment sections, but not on their main news pages. The Mirror, meanwhile, has different sets of social bookmarking links depending on whether the user is viewing their main body of content, or whether they are viewing a 'blog'.

For that reason, I've broken this table of who links to what into two sections - which social bookmarking services are linked to from a newspaper's main stories, and which from their blogs.

And In the absence of a standard international icon for "Sometimes" or "Depends" I've used an orange question mark icon to indicate where the presence of links varies.

Social Bookmarking links on news articles

	Daily Express	Daily Mail	Daily Mirror	The Guardian	The Independent	The Sun	The Telegraph	The Times
del.icio.us		*
Digg		*
Fark
Newsvine		*
Now Public		*
Reddit		*
* Only on certain sections - e.g. sport, technology, entertainment

Social Bookmarking links on newspaper blogs

As I mentioned, the services linked to are often not consistent across a single newspaper web property, and the clearest distinction seemed to be between news and editorial content on the one hand, and on the content badged as 'blogs' on the other. Newspapers seemed, on the whole, to be more confident of adding these types of links to their blog content.

	Daily Express	Daily Mail	Daily Mirror	The Guardian	The Independent	The Sun	The Telegraph	The Times
Blinklist
del.icio.us				*
Digg				*
Fark
Magnolia
Newsvine				*
Now Public				*
Reddit				*
Tailrank				*
Technorati				*
* Only on "Comment Is Free", not on blogs.guardian.co.uk

Of course, these tables beg the question - does placing buttons like these on their site produce any value for the newspapers? It is a difficult one to quantify, but a question I hope to return to soon.

This article is part of a series looking at the Web 2.0 features on British newspaper web sites. It features reviews of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

There are also overviews of some of the "Web 2.0" features each newspaper provides. These cover social bookmarking links, blog features, RSS feeds and the location of RSS feed information.

Posted by Martin Belam, May 10, 2007    
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The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former clients or employers.

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