Social Bookmarking

Bookmarking is the practice of saving the address of a web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. Social book marking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with keywords. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Above picture has list of few social bookmarking sites.

How does it work?

Social Bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed, “amateur” method of classifying information. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag. In this way, the community of users over time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources— something that has come to be known as a “folksonomy.”

Significance

Activities like social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures. Using a folksonomy- based tool for research lets you take advantage of the insights of other users to find information related to the topic you are researching, even in areas that aren’t obviously connected to the primary topic.