Hands up who’s heard of social bookmarking. I expect most people reading this article will have. The concept has been around for an Internet ‘eternity’ now. I thought everyone in the Facebook generation would be familiar with the idea, but I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday, happily telling them about NBS and explaining how we’ve incorporated a ‘social bookmark’ scoring system that’s a bit like ‘Digg for shopping’, and they were like “Dig what!?…”.

Sometimes I think we in the Internet business are in danger of losing touch with the vast majority of people that actually use the Internet… Our target audience… We get caught up in our own little worlds of digging, backing and blogging and forget what it’s all about in the first place.

And if you’re involved in the more technical aspects of website building like I am, you’re in even more danger of getting removed from reality as you have to compete with the ever changing platform on which you’re developing. (ajax, jQuery, browser standards, APIs, blah blah blah).

So just remember, when building a site don’t lose touch with the original purpose. Get an opinion from anyone willing to offer one. If someone says, “don’t ask me I’m hopeless on the Internet”, that’s exactly who you should be asking. If you can persuade them you’ve got a great idea, then everyone else should be a piece of cake.