What Is Social Bookmarking?
Social Bookmarking is the act of creating and managing electronic bookmarks.
But it isn’t just an individual making bookmarks into a closed system, like when you press Ctrl + D on your keyboard when in your browser. If you don’t know what this does, try it now and you’ll find that this site will appear in your favorites list.
How social bookmarking is different is in the fact that the bookmarks and favorites that you create are shared and made public so everyone can see them. Of course, you could change your settings so your bookmarks are private, but that would kind of defeat the point.
But how is that helpful at all? A huge melting pot of massively diverse links isn’t very useful if they cannot be categorized, right?
Right.
Which is why the social bookmarking systems utilize a group tagging system. When the bookmark is added, you can add a series of words which roughly describe the context, content and related subjects of the bookmark in question. On top of that, everyone who sees your bookmark can do exactly the same thing!
This system of groups of people sorting and tagging information is known as “folksonomy”. You may of heard the term “taxonomy”, which is a scientific system of tagging and classification which works on hierarchical units.
Folksonomy is a tagging system, but doesn’t use this explicit scientific method. Instead, it works in the same way as a wiki, so that multiple users view the bookmark and the tags, and then edit them if they are wrong, or even if it just makes more sense to describe it in a different way.
Over time, folksonomy weeds out incorrect information, replacing incorrect or misplaced tags with more and more accurate information.
The great thing about social bookmarking is that it adds a user element to search. Rather than a search engine algorithm dictating what the user gets in terms of results, the tags that the social groups apply are the determining factor.
As such, they are a great way of implementing a user based search, similar to the concept that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia envisaged.
And we all can see how popular Wikipedia turned out!
