Social Bookmarking

About Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of web pages. Users save links to web pages that they like or want to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored.

Most social bookmark services are organized by users applying “tags” or keywords to content on a Web site. This means that other users can view bookmarks that are associated with a chosen tag, and see information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. In many cases, users can also comment or vote on bookmarked items.

Social bookmarking is also interchangeably sometimes referred to as folksonomy, collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. “Folksonomy” is a combination of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a taxonomy generated by a person or group of people.

Reference: http://www.networksolutions.com/support/social-bookmarking-what-is-it-and-how-can-it-help-promote-my-site/

Bookmarking Background

Before Web 2.0 tools Internet users bookmarked Web site URLs for later reference in their browser’s bookmark folder.
When users wanted to again access the site they would click on the relevant link in the browser’s bookmark folder.
However, the saved bookmark was only available on that specific computer.
In addition, users were not able to reciprocally share bookmarks with others.
Finally, a single individual would only be able to locate a fraction of Web sites that might be of interest.

VIDEO – Social Bookmarking in Plain English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjDdiFFZab0

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking allows Internet users to identify, label, store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of Web pages for later access.
These online applications enable users to collect and designate informational resources both for their own use and for sharing with others.
Social bookmarking is used interchangeably with the term “social tagging”.
Social bookmarking consists of reciprocal communities of like-minded users.

What is Tagging?

A tag is a keyword assigned by a user to represent the subject content of a bookmark, or other online content.
Tagging is a method of information classification and makes a collection of resources easier to discover and share.
Tagging is a social activity and the more popular a tag is, the more likely it is meaningful to users.
More popular resources are tagged more frequently and a system of “ranking” is based on perceived utility and value.

Workplace Applications

Like minded individuals can seek out each other and create new communities to influence and evolve folksonomies.
Users can see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned to that tag.
Organizations take advantage of the insights of others to locate information, even in semi related areas.

Classroom Applications

Social bookmarking site visitors can search for resources through methods such as keyword, person or popularity.
Visitors can view the public bookmarks, tags and classification schemes that other users have created.
Users can see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned to that tag.
Users can assign multiple tags to a Web site URL.
Social bookmarking uses RSS which easily links to blogs.