Social Bookmarking

Social marking, as defined in Wikipedia, is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. It is very much different from simple Bookmarking where you save the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. Tagging or saving bookmarks to a public website has become very common now-a-days. Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Simpy etc. have become household names.

Social bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when these sites just began operating. Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others. Anyone can participate in social bookmarking. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you need to register with a social bookmarking site, where you can store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to these social bookmarking sites can easily search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Social Bookmarking provides an entirely unique way to organize information and categorize your resources. You can assign also use social bookmarking as a networking tool to make social connections with other interested individuals. Tagging information resources with relevant keywords has the potential to change the way how we store and find information. Social bookmarking helps in simplifying the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers and other resources.

The Significance

Social bookmarking gives you the opportunity to express differing perspectives on any topic or information. This process also allows you to connect with like-minded individuals and create new communities also known as folksonomy.