The Basics Facts On Social Bookmarking
The Basics Facts On Social Bookmarking
Everyone who uses the internet for any extended period of time knows exactly what a bookmark is and what it’s used for. It’s an invisible mark on a webpage that saves itself to your browser so that you can go back to it when you want to without having to remember the website’s actual address. However, many people don’t realize that they can also share these bookmarks with other people who are interested in the same things they are. But more and more people are reading up on social bookmarking and realizing that it can be extremely valuable for everything from college term papers to sharing good recipes.
Passing along information is becoming increasingly easy in today’s technology driven world and social bookmarking is part of the reason why. When someone makes a bookmark on a social bookmarking site, they are also able to do something unique – they can give the bookmark a special description that tells others what the site is about and why it’s a good site to visit when you’re looking for information. These sites also using something known as “tagging” – a system of one word or one phrase descriptions that categorize a website; words like “videos” or “recipes” can be used as tags, and entries with the same tags become grouped together on the site. Most social bookmarking sites also have networks – groups of people who are bookmarking and sharing similar sites; this also allows the groups to share bookmarks privately rather than publicly.
Social bookmarking didn’t come around until 1996, when a fledgling company known as iList established itself. Within three years of this, the demand for ways of sharing information across the internet became so strong that several other companies based on social networking also launched. But when the website known as Delicious in 2003, the concept of social bookmarking truly blossomed – it was Delicious that truly revolutionized the tagging system and coined the term “social bookmarking.” This special tagging system allowed people to not only use tags but to also use tweet clouds, which are basically main categories that tags are filed under to make navigating them easier.
This system has many advantages. The sites can be searched for bookmarks using generic keywords and many results will pop up. And the system itself makes navigating sites easier, since clicking on a specific tag gets rid of all unrelated tags. Being able to do this helps both friends and total strangers share information about all manners of things.
