An Introduction to Social Bookmarking Whether you realize it or not you are probably already familiar with the concept of social bookmarking. The concept has been around for a number of years now and is now a tool commonly used by Internet marketers.
Most people make use of the bookmarks or favorites function of their web browser, whether that be Internet Explorer, Firefox, or whatever your browser of choice may be. They all have the ability to store sites of interest so you can find them again easily in the future. That is fine for personal use, but I am sure that like me you have almost certainly at some point found a page on the internet that you wanted to share with a friend. In the early days of the web the easiest way to do this was to paste the web page address into an email and send it to your friend. A slow and time consuming process, especially if you want to share lots of bookmarks with a large number of friends.
Social bookmarking sites take the idea of Favorites or bookmarks from your web browser and takes it a stage further. Instead of saving the link to your personal computer, they enable you to save the link directly to the Internet. These lists of bookmarks which you build up on Social Bookmarking sites can be either privately accessible to yourself.
Advantages of Social Bookmarking for Users We have already seen that social bookmarking sites enable you to share your favorite links with other users, but why is that considered a useful thing to do?
Most social bookmarking sites enable you see what other users have tagged on the site. Items are normally sorted by most popular or new or by general areas like technology, sport or politics. In this way you can easily search the relevant category and see what people have found to be most interesting in each section.
If you are not sure which category you need to look in, then you can always type your request into the search tool on the social bookmarking site. Because these results are based on sites that have been sorted manually by individuals you will be likely to get a much more relevant set of results than you would from any search engine. In this context it can be helpful to think of social bookmarking sites as intelligent search engines.
Social Bookmarking sites do have a couple of other advantages over more traditional automated search engines. Through the use of the recent and popular tags they offer a fast and easy way to identify newly added information which may be of interest, and as the various links are rated by the human users of the social bookmarking
Making Friends on Social Bookmarking Sites When any piece of content is added to a social bookmarking site the username of the person who added the content to the site is usually prominently displayed on the site.
As you spend time on the social bookmarking site and discover content which you find interesting or useful, it can be helpful to make a note of the person who supplied the content to the site.
If you find the same name occurs more than a few times then it is probably worthwhile adding that name to your friends list on the bookmarking site. This gives you the option of seeing what other content this person is adding to the site, and enables you to find other pieces of content which they have added and you may otherwise have missed.
Social Bookmarking friends are a useful way to discover new content, and new websites which you might otherwise have spent hours searching for on the web.
Defining a Social Bookmarking Site social bookmarking is continuing to evolve and as a result it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide exactly what is a social bookmarking site and what isn t. Some people would argue that because sites such as Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook allow users to share links and websites with other users then these should be included in any list of social bookmarking sites. Another range of sites which are controversial in this regard are Social News sites such as http://Digg.com. I have chosen to include Digg and similar news sites within this guide. I recognize that these sites offer a service which is broader than traditional social bookmarking, but the sharing of links is still so integral to these sites that I feel it makes little sense to exclude them. I have followed the same principle elsewhere on this list and included a number of other sites that are much bigger than simple social bookmarking websites, but still include social bookmarking a a substantial part of what they do.
What is the difference between a social news site and social bookmarking site?
Both of these type of sites allow you to bookmark anything, as long as it fits in with the theme or purpose of the site. Many people would argue that there is really very little difference between these two groups of Social sites, and for the purposes of this report I shall treat them as the same thing.
For the more technically minded I offer this way of differentiating between the two types of site
1. Social bookmarking sites allow you to post a URL, title, description, and tags for whatever you are bookmarking.
2. Social news sites allow you to post a URL, title, summary, and tags. Both types of site often allow you to vote , like or recommend news items, but social news tends to cater more for stories, blog posts, articles, and press releases.
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