What is Social Bookmarking?

The Internet is becoming more and more accessible to the users, so much so that most people who surf the 'Net also end up contributing something back to the Websites they visit. Take for example sites like YouTube, where the content is provided by the people who visit the Website itself. Which is why today, with such a user-driven tool, it is important for any Website marketer to understand the concept of social bookmarking.

To answer the question of what social bookmarking is, it is important that we understand the meaning of the word “Bookmarking”. Bookmarking, in the context of the Internet, is the act of saving the address of a web page or a URL corresponding to that page in an online file so that the user can revisit the site at their own convenience. Social bookmarking allows Internet users to manage, search and organize bookmarks of Web pages. These bookmarks can be viewed publicly by people across the Internet, or only to a select group of online friends.

The system is unique as it allows users to save links to web pages that they would like to revisit or share with others, with the help of descriptions of the Website in the form of meta data. Meta data literally means “data about data”. With a reference to social bookmarking, the bookmark would be saved online with some information on what the Website is all about, which is the meta data. These bookmarks are public, however the user can choose to make the bookmarks available only privately or even to a select group of people. People can usually view these bookmarks in different order, based on parameters like chronology, category, tags, and meta data or even via search engines.

There are many social bookmarking Websites online that allow you to save your bookmarks and share them. The most popular of these is Digg (http://www.digg.com) and del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). Most of these social bookmarking services encourage users to save bookmarks based on tags or keywords and descriptions provided by the users. They also allow users to save Websites based on categories that the users themselves can define if there is not an already existing category.

Unlike search engines, which are software and algorithm-based indexers of Websites, social bookmarking uses a more human approach to indexing. Social bookmarking allows people to select which sites are worth viewing and which ones are utter rubbish. While software and algorithms can be fooled into thinking that a Website is worth getting a top rank, it is not so easy to do so with real human beings, who can use their intellect and logic to reason out Websites and data. Thus, social bookmarking process offers more elaborate and detailed indexing of Websites on the Internet.

Social bookmarking also allows users of the service to share information and Websites. As an added bonus, social bookmarking services allow you to set up a free account, so you can log into any computer with Internet access and view your own bookmarks. Social bookmarking has also become an added tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where sites compete for the best rankings in the likes of google, yahoo and MSN search engines. So from a Web developer's point of view, social bookmarking is the best of both worlds: a powerful marketing and great SEO tool.