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What Is Social Bookmarking?

In simple terms, the ‘social bookmarking’ system involves internet users saving those links to web pages that they want to share or simply to remember. Social bookmarking itself is the method by which these people use tags to search, organise, manage and store bookmarks, using metadata. The tags give rise to the term ‘social tagging’ or ’folksonomy’, where many users collaboratively and / or collectively use keywords to add metadata to shared content. Though the bookmarks are usually in the public domain, these can be shared in various combinations of private and public spaces, such as within specific networks or groups or even saved privately. The bookmarks are ordered chronologically, based on the search engine, tag or category.

The whole concept of public or private shared bookmarks on the web was initiated by itList way back in 1996. With competition came newer features, provided by companies like Blink, Clip2, HotLinks, etc. who mostly had folders (instead of tags) to organise the bookmarks. Differences in product design as well as approach meant that all these early service providers could not make their products viable and eventually most closed down in the early 2000s. However, by 2004 newer organisations had started using tags for the same service and slowly the social bookmarking phenomenon took off. Delicious, Furl, Blue Dot are some of the early names in the field, with some developing social tagging and bookmarking services for enterprises and businesses, while others used a similar system for social news. Big names like IBM came in with their Lotus Connections a couple of years back.

Instead of the folders used in browsers, social bookmark services users make do with the more informal tags, though at times there is a combination of the two. Information is available of the number of users who have bookmarked a particular tag and viewing of these bookmarks is possible. Some services actually create tag or bookmark clusters by drawing inferences from tag relationships. Web feeds are also provided by most social bookmarking services for the lists, which are sometimes organised by tags. Doing this indicates when new bookmarks have been shared, tagged or saved. With the evolution of this popular concept, newer features like comments and ratings of bookmarks, importing and exporting as well as emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, etc. have now been developed.

Social bookmarking has increasingly become popular after the initial hiccups of the early part of this century. With newer players in the field services and features are being regularly added with the result that more and more people are using the format. Since bookmarking is done by actual people rather than software, it is likely that a person can locate more appropriate content through this means. As such, it can quite definitely be stated that a social bookmarking is progressing towards feeding and supporting itself. Even though all this happens in the virtual world, there is a sense of belonging and support. Over time I am sure that social bookmarking will keep evolving with more user friendly features.