How is Social Bookmarking Affecting Education?

Teaching and learning are the two components of education. The objective of transferring information and knowledge from one person to another person or a group of persons is being greatly affected by social bookmarking.

The exchange of information and the coming together of like-minded individuals into loosely knitted online communities are both impacting education as a whole.

For so many centuries education suffered from slow communication. Today the internet itself has greatly sped up communication and social bookmarking has doubled that speed in the last few years.

Social bookmarking has created a method whereby bibliographies, papers, etc. can be easily and quickly shared and accessed by multiple people at the same time. These same resources can be altered or edited in real time.

Why is Social Bookmarking Important to Internet Marketing?

There are several ways in which social bookmarking is having an affect on internet marketing. It would be hard to determine just which effect is having the greatest impact.

The ability to create tags using key words which social bookmarking sites allow is very attractive to internet marketers.

It didn’t take the internet marketing community long to figure out that these links and the backlinks that are created when the links are added to other favorites lists cause search engine spiders to visit websites and that PageRank can be dramatically increased along with the number of visitors to a website.

The more visitors, as any internet marketer worth his salt knows, means more sales of products and services.

So social bookmarking sites provide free advertisement, increase the number of visitors to a website and are a great search engine optimisation tool to boot.

Another asset that internet marketers quickly became aware of that social bookmarking sites provide is that they are great research tools in and of themselves.

For example: a website owner might find that a ‘sailing’ tag is also associated with a ‘boat repair’ tag. That information can open doors for business expansion.

Is There a Down Side to Social Bookmarking?

If there is an up-side, you can bet there is always a down-side for anything and everything and social bookmarking is not the exception to that rule.

The very fact that social bookmarking is user driven is one of the potential down sides of it. Users are not professionals. Users are just people and the ability to use social bookmarking sites for fun as well as for profit does not require a great deal of technical knowledge.

As a matter of fact, it requires almost none. And because users are ‘amateurs’ (for lack of a better word), key words used in tags are not consistent. The information is sometimes scattered and key words that seem logical to amateurs don’t necessarily lead to related topics.

Yet another potential down-side and one that is happening more and more frequently is that users are abusing the system. Since it is a user driven system it is more susceptible to abuse and misuse.

There are spammers out there that are bookmarking the same site multiple times.

The idea, of course, is that the more times the link appears the better the search engine spiders like it and the more apt the link is to be clicked on and the more apt it is that the site will be visited.

More visitors always equal more sales of products and services.

What is The Bottom Line of Social Bookmarking?

The bottom line is that social bookmarking is here and it is here to stay. People are using social bookmarking sites to make social connections as well as to form communities.

From the internet marketing point of view, social bookmarking is a tool that can be used to increase search engine optimisation, the number of website visitors and ultimately increase sales but there is also the possibility of the system being abused.

Like everything else, the more social bookmarking is abused, the less effective it will become.

Internet marketers are learning that they can have a lot of fun by using sites like MySpace, Face-Book and Friendster and social bookmarking sites and make a lot of money in the process. It’s what is known as a win/win situation and one that internet marketers are flocking to in droves.