What is Social Bookmarking?

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is defined as: “Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorise a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others.

Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others - a personal knowledge management tool.”

Actually, the idea was first launched back in 1996 as ‘itlist’. Other similar sites quickly followed but that all went belly-up with the dot-com bubble bust in 2001. The idea is new again now with the advent of Web 2.0 and this time around it is thriving.

Who is Using Social Bookmarking?

In a word - everybody! Researchers have found social bookmarking sites to be an invaluable tool as they conduct research and find the need to share information about research with their colleagues.

Professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers are using social bookmarking services in record numbers.

But social bookmarking is far more than simply a tool for research. People from all walks of like are using social bookmarking.

Users of popular websites like Friendster, Face-Book and MySpace have found that it is very easy to share information about websites that they find to be of mutual interest.

Networks of friends can be set up so that whenever a new posting is made to a social networking site other members of the network are notified immediately by RSS feed.

With all of this instant communication happening, you can see why those who are involved in Internet marketing are very much in touch with social bookmarking sites.

These innovative marketers join such sites as Friendster, Face-Book or MySpace and while they are having a lot of fun, they are also selling their products and services.

They are getting visitors to their websites. They are improving their PageRank. They have found that social bookmarking is one of the very best search engine optimisation tools that have come along in a very long time.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

The basic concept of Web 2.0 is that it is user-directed and social bookmarking is a part of Web 2.0 so it is, of course, user directed. Social bookmarking is a way of organising and categorising information with the use of ‘tags’.

Tags are user generated and are based upon key words that identify the bookmark so this is a true user-directed way that information is organised and categorised.

When a bookmarked site is clicked on, the social bookmarking site identifies the person who created the bookmark and provides access to other sites that the same user has bookmarked.

Now, the person who created the bookmark and the tag is also provided information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who clicked on it.

This system makes it very easy for like-minded people to make social connections and to identify others who have the same interests. Over time a community of users develops.

As a community of users develops, they sometimes develop a very unique set of key words that define resources of common interest. These unique sets of keywords have come to be referred to as ‘folksonomy’.

Wikipedia defines the term, folksonomy as: “Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.

In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams.”

How will Social Bookmarking Impact the Web?

Actually, it is pretty clear right now that social bookmarking is having a huge impact on the way that information is being classified, categorised, stored and exchanged.

It is impossible to believe that in the future the impact will be even stronger. Web 1.0 was static but Web 2.0 is fluid. The face is ever changing.

The technology that social bookmarking is based upon is really rather simple - there isn’t anything complex about it. It is user friendly. The level of knowledge needed to gain huge benefits from social bookmarking is low.

People do not have to be computer gurus to make use of the technology at all. The technology is so simple and the system is so easy to use that it will continue to grow in popularity into the foreseeable future.

Because of this inevitable growth of social bookmarking and the easily used tagging of such things as multimedia files, it may well be just as inevitable that the design and function of databases themselves will also change drastically.

They may have to change just to be able to accommodate this new way of managing information.