subject: Social Bookmarks: What Is A Social Bookmarking Service? [print this page] ocial bookmarks are a way to create bookmarks online so that you can share them with your friends. Here is how it works. You are surfing the net and come across an interesting website. You bookmark the page for future reference. But what if you want share it with your friends? Sending links to a number of people can be tedious. So, instead you can bookmark them online on a bookmarking website and all your friends can see it there. Unlike sharing a file, the actual resources are not shared, rather the social bookmark that reference them.
You can also add free text comments or ratings to existing social bookmarks that will help other users understand the content of the website. Apart from that, you can vote for or against the content of the bookmarked websites and "tag" them. Tagging is used to assign a keyword or term to a piece of information. This way, you create a social bookmark, which allows users to collectively classify and find information on the Internet.
Most bookmarking services allow social bookmarks on their pages to be public or private, arranged chronologically or by category and tag. This means, the private bookmarks can only be shared within groups or with certain people and rather than a browser based way of arranging related bookmarks in folder, they can now be arranged by categories. Moreover, you can view information such as the number of users who have tagged a particular content or clusters, which are a group of related tags or bookmarks. Some services even offer web feeds, which enable users to know when new bookmarks are added, tagged and shared by other users and a few have even gone so far as to allow import and export of bookmarks from browsers.
Advantages Of Social Bookmarks
Online bookmarks do a better job of indexing as all the resource location and classification is done by humans. They are thus more accurate than a search engine algorithm which just looks up keywords and not the context they are used in. This is especially useful when one needs to find something very specific, but does not have the time to browse through a search engine. Apart from that, one may find on a bookmarking website something that is still not indexed by a search engine.
Disadvantages Of Social Bookmarks
On the other hand, informal vocabularies, lack of standard keywords, unstructured tags, spelling and grammatical errors are few drawbacks of social bookmark websites. Furthermore, the more a particular page or site is tagged or bookmarked; the better is its visibility on the Internet. As a result, spammers and Internet marketers alike have started using bookmarks as a way to increase web traffic to their website wherein, the same webpage is tagged multiple times, using a lot of popular tags.
