Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration

Social bookmarking, it's what Delicious does (Digg is social news in contrast, while StumbleUpon is social browsing), is one of the best working things when it comes to the wisdom of crowds.

While on Digg the ignorance of interest groups rules and StumbleUpon tends to lowest common denominator e.g. "funny images",

social bookmarking really reflects popularity and quality of particular content.

There is even better social bookmarking out there, it's (social) image bookmarking. It works even better as you don't even have to visit the site the image stems from in case you're busy.

So I present to you these image bookmarking sites for daily inspiration:

FFFFOUND!
The best image bookmarking is probably FFFFOUND! due to its limited access to friends and friends of friends of the founders. This way they ensure high quality if the images. It's very graphic design oriented so you'll find lots of self promoting designers and photographers with their works. It's OK as most of it is of good quality but sometimes I get annoyed by the prevalence of ads for Nike shoes and the likes.

Dropular
Dropular collects high quality images and it's as good as FFFFOUND! but has a smaller community. This means less images as well. So you won't find inspiration here 10 times a day but maybe just twice in 24h. It will be certainly inspiring though. They manage to select really the most striking images out there. Plus there is not as much NSFW stuff that diverts your attention.

vi.sualize.us
As with Typeish, vi.sualize.us combines features of those above but has a higher number of images. While Typeish is very limited in its functionality vi.sualize.us is more complex and feature rich.

we heart it
With we heart it it's difficult to find things that set it apart from the others above. It makes explicit images of babes "unsafe" by default so that you can visit it at work too. Girl and woman are among the most popular tags. It's similar to vi.sualize.us.

pichaus
pichaus is a very minimalistic image bookmarking site. It has high quality images but the Adsense banner ads on top and at the bottom are quite annoying.

imgfave
imgfave is clearly the dark horse here. I didn't know it unil now, I just found it via Google. It's in the top 10 for the phrase image bookmarking. It's based on the same microblogging software as Identi.ca but it's more image bookmarking nonetheless. It looks quite similar to FFFFOUND! but the Verdana headline looks pretty ugly so it seems it's a very alpha version as they didn't even have the time to create a decent looking graphic or headline for their own name. It looks promising nonetheless.

Some people may criticize that it's content theft due to copyrighted images being displayed on those sites. Maybe. In many cases I've seen images preserved by FFFFOUND! in that the original was off line by the time I found it there. So the public has access to an image archive in its truest sense.

SEO 2.0 is about optimization of all kind of media for Universal Search, social media and beyond.

Appealing to image bookmarking sites is a must use for all people doing something visual.

Don't do it like "fun bloggers" aka the real content thieves or self promoting graphic designers who exploit these services. SEO 2.0 is based on legitimate usage of social media.

My SEO 2.0 blog is hugely successful on Google Image search, I get more visitors via my image searches than via text based search.

Of course more people are interested in visual content than a niche topic which is also limited to written language, even English.

Next time I will teach you how to appeal to image searchers and what to do with this "useless traffic".

Indeed I'm so popular on Google Image search that I am thinking about partnering with artists, photographers and graphic designers to provide illustration in exchange for lots of publicity. Want to get found with your images? Let me use them on the SEO 2.0 blog.

Last updated: November 12th, 2010.