Give A Link
Is it better to give a link than to receive? At Give A Link, you can do both. Give A Link is a downright spiffy site where you can share your links with other users. The design is cool and makes you want to click, surf and explore.
The main page save, “Donate your bookmarks, share the missing links.” It really makes you feel like you’re making a difference, doesn’t it? The most popular stuff, listed along the right side of the page, is pretty interesting. There are quite a few music sites there, as well as some tech stuff. In particular, Give A Link likes podcasts and sites where you can listen to music. There seems to be an entertainment (movies, music, etc.) twist to Give A Link.
Give A Link’s front page has a counter with all the stats: 376 users, 2499 donations, 4976512 relationships and 1609285 links. As you can see, there is some major networking on with Give A Link, and with a million and a half links, you should be able to find some things that interest you there.
Basically, you can “donate” your bookmarks to Give A Link. While GAL is a regular social bookmarking site where you can save, share and search, it’s also intended to provide marketers with some data mining possibilities. GAL keeps stats concerning users’ tastes (while keeping users’ privacy, of course). They publish these stats so that marketers can find out what kind of users like what kind of sites.
GAL likes users to donate their bookmarks as is. They like the random and strange categories users have. It all goes in to their research on how we surf the web. They also like to have anything at all to contribute to their list of sites available for other users.
Does that sound a little creepy to you, that they’re interested in what you like? Well, first off, everywhere you go, somebody is watching. Secondly, at Give A Link, you can submit your links anonymously without creating a profile. That should give you an idea that there’s nothing shady going on. GAL is concerned with the data, not trying to sell you stuff.
What they’re particularly interested in is looking for semantic links between sites. This basically means what tags go with what other tags. This way, they can get an idea of different web surfers’ general tastes. They want to make this information available to the community.
GAL is all about openness. They’re not in competition with the other social bookmarking sites, but trying to offer users a useful service, and contribute to overall knowledge.
