Given the immense popularity of social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.is, Digg and Reddit, it’s somewhat surprising that the larger Internet portal sites have not made serious efforts at providing the same sort of socially-driven, crowdsourced nerve centers that could potentially create millions of daily page views - and the accompanying advertising dollars.

Google Bookmarks has not really caught on, and Yahoo Bookmarks seems more like a follower playing catch-up than the latest cool place to find out what others are reading.

Microsoft is finally getting into the game. A few days ago, John Martin, Microsoft’s Lead Evangelist for Server & Tools Online, announced that a new service called Social Bookmarks will be released as a preview in the coming weeks (note that the word “beta” is not used).

Although Microsoft’s Social Bookmarks does not seem to count “votes,” it does give the number of people who have bookmarked each item. In terms of potentially pushing one’s own original content as linkbait, Social Bookmarks will soon be another must-have account. Thus, as the potential for social media marketing grows, the argument that every website should be producing compelling, original content on a regular basis is only getting stronger.

For now, Social Bookmarks will only be available in English. There is no timetable yet for a global rollout of the the service, though Microsoft has set up a Social Bookmarks Discussion Forum.

Three questions: What sort of crowd will Microsoft’s new services attract? Will this put pressure on Google and Yahoo to improve their existing services or market them in new ways? Finally, when will Apple get into the social networking service game?