Social Bookmarking
Have you ever emailed a friend and sent them a link to a website you thought they might find interesting? If so, you have participated in social bookmarking.
What is social bookmarking? Here's the simple explanation: It is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them on the Internet. Because your bookmarks are online, you can easily share them with friends.
And here it is in more technical terms. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. This is accomplished with the help of metadata, usually in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become social tagging, or "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content."
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually publicly available, but may be saved privately. They may be shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. This is a very valuable tool for search engine optimization.
As these services are becoming more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks. Also the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
The biggest social bookmarking site is Delicious (del.icio.us). It is a service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
With Delicious you can bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from anywhere.
Instead of having different bookmarks on every computer, social bookmarking services makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks kept in sync between all of your computers. Even if you're not on your own computer, you can still get to your bookmarks from the Delicious website.
You can share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return that are recommended by other people. If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out sometime. Then they make their recommendations. Then id you find interesting users, you can use their Subscriptions and Network features to keep track of the tags and users that you find most interesting.
You can find out what's hot with other users by checking out the most popular tags. By looking at popular bookmarks for a tag, you'll be able to discover the most interesting bookmarks on the topics you're most interested in. Browse bookmarks on just about anything from the best programming tips to the most popular travel sites, all in an easy to read format.
Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site makes it easy for your readers to save and share your content.
What started out as a way to send bookmarks to friends has in reality grown into social search engines. You no longer need to search through thousands of results to find a needle in a haystack. Now, you can simply go to your favorite social bookmarking site, choose the category or tag that matches your interest, and find the most popular websites.
Social News Bookmarking Sites
Websites like Digg, Reddit and Propeller focus on social bookmarking of news-related items such as politics, sports, technology, etc. These websites will often feature breaking headlines and bloggers discussing the current news items.
Social news sites are different from standard social bookmarking sites by focusing on specific articles and blog posts rather than websites. Therefore, they can be a great news source and they also allow readers to participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items.
