What Is Social Bookmarking And How Does It Work?

What is Social Bookmarking and how does it work? Social bookmarking is a way of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and tagging them with keywords.

Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer.

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, notifying users when a URL no longer functions.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 World Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites

Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Social bookmarking history and how it started

Social bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when sites like Furl, Simpy, and del.icio.us began operating.

Other social bookmarking sites include de.lirio.us, an open source version of del.icio.us, and citeulike, a social bookmarking site for academic papers.

Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others.

Social bookmarking 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, “amateur” method of classifying information.

Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic.

Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned 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.”