Social Bookmarking

Guide Note

Social Bookmarking is a way of finding, sharing, organizing, and categorizing links to pages of interest on the internet. The term is often associated with Web 2.0 as several social bookmarking sites and services have come into existence in recent years. Most notable among these are Digg, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon all of which use differing methods to share the links.

Fast Facts

1. itLists was the first social bookmarking service, launched in 1996
2. List of social bookmarking sites:
   • Digg
   • Del.icio.us
   • StumbleUpon
   • Reddit
   • Propeller
   • Ma.gnolia
   • Furl
   • Newsvine

Social Bookmarking works by allowing users to bookmark a website, but instead of storing the location of the link on their own computer, it is added to a list of links that is kept on a web site. The users friends and contacts or anyone can see such lists. Links that are listed by the most users are typically placed on the front page of the site. One of the most useful things about social bookmarking is that people selected the links and found them useful, in contrast to a search engine, which typically uses an algorithm to determine what a user is looking for based on the keywords they entered. One of the problems with social networking is that is it an easy system to take advantage of: authors of Spam-laden blogs (aka Splogs) often share their sites via social networking even though the site is of no practical value to the end user.