What Is Social Bookmarking?

Organizing Bookmarks

Most social bookmarking users use informal tags to organize their bookmarks. That takes away the need to use the traditional folders. The days when the older browser based systems were used, are over. However, some bookmark services encourage you to use a combination of folders and tags. Once you choose a tag, you get to know how many users have bookmarked that page. Sometimes clusters of tags are created based on the relationship of tags and bookmarks.

Web feeds for bookmarks include lists organized by tags. Some social bookmarking services take pride in providing these web feeds to their valued customers. As and when any new bookmarks are saved, shared or tagged by some users, the subscribers immediately become aware of it. Some extra features such as ratings and comments add value to these services. The more mature and popular a service becomes, the better features it provides and vice versa. Some of these features are: ability to import and export bookmarks, bookmark e-mailing, web annotation etc. Some social network or group features may be added as well.

History Of Social Bookmarking

The first social bookmarking service was launched in April 1996. Within a short span of three years the bookmarking scene became increasingly competitive. But along with the famous dot-com bubble burst, these companies too could not sustain themselves. There were no viable models for making money from bookmarking. It was a move ahead of its time.

The term 'social bookmarking' was officially coined in the latter half of 2003. This service was mainly focused on tagging at that time. In 2004 things started heating up. By 2007 major companies such as IBM entered the scene. Now we have specialized services for scientists, and there are services completely focused on business. There is a social software market, and BBC website has added bookmarking links for its news reports. Such is the wide reach and scope of this service.

Social bookmarking has a great future. It is far superior to traditional search engine spiders. In this system all classifications are done by humans and not by software. Since humans understand the content of the resource, the tag-based classification is authentic.

Lee Green, Success Coach and Business Mentor

Lee has over 30 years of business experience and has been online since 1994. He is an internet marketing and direct response professional and specializes in Web 2.0, Affiliate Marketing and Network Marketing strategies and techniques. People consider him consistently reliable, a good and well-liked friend and trusted advisor.

To subscribe to his newsletter and FREE REPORTS go to:
http://www.VideoNicheRich.com

To learn more about how to make money online go to:
http://www.NewMoneyNetwork.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_J._Green