What Is Social Bookmarking And How Does It Work?

As a blogger, you will agree with me that social bookmarking is important when it comes to blogging. So what is Social Bookmarking and how does it work?

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.

It’s simply a way of saving bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with keywords. On the other hand, bookmarking is the practice of saving website URLs you wish to visit in the future.

History and how it started

Social bookmarking is historically linked to the launching of such sites as Furl, Simpy, and Del.icio.us. Other sites such as De.lirio.us – an open-source version of Del.icio.us, and Citeulike were later launched.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 World Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others. It is just like content curation and anyone can participate in it.

How does social bookmarking work?

Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed method of classifying information.

The service indicates who created each bookmark and provides access to that person’s other bookmarked resources. For this reason, users can easily make social connections with other individuals.

Also, users can see how many people have used a tag and search for resources assigned to that tag. In this way, the community of users over time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources —something that has come to be known as a “folksonomy.”

Creating a collection

To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private.

Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work and notify users when a URL no longer functions.

Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword and popularity. Then you will be able to see the public bookmarks other users have created and saved.