Social Bookmarking

What is social bookmarking?

Technically speaking, social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy ( or “folksonomy” as its sometimes referred to in certain techie circles) of Web sites that have been bookmarked by internet users, with the help of metadata, so they can store, organize, search and share URLs.

Now for all those people who don’t spend all their free time reading CNET, social bookmarking is really just tool to put all your favorite Web pages in one place so you can tell your friends and professional colleagues what they should be looking at when they’re online. For example, say you are a student studying public relations (a stretch, I know). You can use a social bookmarking system to put all of your favorite blog posts about your future profession in one place so your parents know they’re not wasting their money on tuition.

How does social bookmarking work?

A social bookmarking system allows internet users to save their favorite links they want to remember or share with others. These links can then be organized by “tagging” them, which forms collections of bookmarks divided into categories so other people can find them. Imagine, again as a public relations student, you are doing research on the latest trends in PR practice, but you happen to also be a bit ADD. You can put all the sites you find about “blogging” in one place with the tag as something like “blogging” (mind-blowing, I know) and all the other ones about “celebrity gossip” tagged as “guilty pleasure” in another place.

Most social bookmarking sites also enable browsing other bookmarks with similar tags so you can see what other people like you found while they were aimlessly surfing the ‘net. However, if you don’t want people to know you were reading about Paris Hilton’s latest scandal or Madge’s workout regimen but still don’t want to forget that juicy site’s URL, social bookmarking systems also lets you mark some bookmarks as private.

When did all this “tagging” and “bookmarking” begin?

The first true social bookmarking site was started in April 1996 (think back to the good ole days of the Spice Girls and the Macarena) with the launch of itList. Within the next three years, a whole batch of SM sites cropped up including BackFlip, Blink, Clip2, Click Marks, and HotLinks. However, these sites died a sudden under the “dot-com bubble burst” due to a lack of revenue-generating opportunities. (This was clearly before the days of Google’s Adwords…)

So, what can SB do for me?

There are many advantages to using a social bookmarking site. For one, SBs searches find sites that have been classified by living, breathing humans, not just webcrawlers like most search engines. This means that the stuff you find under a certain tag actually relates to what you’re searching for, instead of just searching for the number of times a word or phrase is mentioned on a certain Web site. Think about what happens when you Google “guilty pleasure” without the safe search mode turned on... things could get very naked, very quickly.

And, social bookmarking systems can also rank sites based on the number of times other people have bookmarked it. Meaning: like-minded people saving sites that can actually help you find the info you want instead of a search engine ranking sites based on their interconnectivity.

Professors and even corporate big-wigs have started using SB to tell the little people like students and middle management what they should be thinking and talking about.

Ok, it can’t be all that great or else I would have heard about it sooner…

There are some downsides that the minds behind SB can’t really fix. First of all, because of the variety of different terminologies and vocabulary of the English language (and not to mention new slang terms that are created by the thousands everyday), there is no standard set of keywords. A hip-hop artist fan could tag an article about managing your finances “cheddar,” and a suburban father could tag the same article “fiscal responsibility.” The SB system wouldn’t be able to relate the two to people who don’t what either tag means (i.e. me). You say “potato,” and I say “what is cheddar?!?”

Also, there are a lot of dummies out there who can use a SB site but can’t spell to save their life and end up tagging an article about killer strawberry daiquiris as “daccury recipe.”

Recently, due to the intense internet competition, SB sites have become the latest battleground for spammers and unethical corporations who try to up their site’s traffic for search engine optimization. The more a site is submitted or bookmarked, the better chance it has of being found. So for that company who sells male enhancement pills over the internet, SB provides just another way for them to annoy us.

What are some SB sites I could try? (a.k.a. the easiest ones to use)

Probably the most popular social bookmarking site available today is delicious (formally known as del.icio.us). According to their website, delicious is ‘da bomb because:

“With an emphasis on the power of the community, delicious greatly improves how
people discover, remember, manage and share on the internet. “


The many features of delicious are what attract it to so many people. These include:
1. A simple interface that is easy to use
2. A human-readable URL scheme
3. The cutesy domain name (I know I want to click on something called Delicious)
4. RSS feeds that provided syndication
5. The fact that it’s FREE.


Another popular site for SB newbies is StumbleUpon. This service lets users bookmark Web sites, photo and videos as they are viewing them with a special downloadable toolbar. When you find a site that you like (such as that one about ScarJo’s secret wedding), you just click on the “Stumble!” button and the service adds it to your personal profile. You can then give it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” depending on your opinion of the quality of the gossip….er…information. Also, you can search for sites that other “stumblers” have found and the service only shows you the ones they have given a “thumbs up.” StumbleUpon, therefore, forms a collaborative opinion on website quality by logging each user’s “thumb” rating. It’s like Robert Ebert’s guide to the internet.

For more information on how cool social bookmarking is, you can visit the sites below. Maybe you can even add them to your own list of bookmarks!

7 Things You Should Know About: Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Social Bookmarking: Tools for Collaboration and Interaction
Social Media Survey
Links that are Worth Building

By: Allison Brill