What Is Social Bookmarking?
When you are clicking around looking at different web sites, you are bound to visit one that you want to return to later. What do you do in that case? Simple, your web browser has a handy bookmark feature that allows you to save a link to the current site URL (otherwise known as a web address). Once you have a few bookmarks, you can organize them, get rid of the ones you don’t want any more, or even e-mail them to friends. However, web browser bookmarks are quirky — your web browser loves them, but if you want to edit already saved bookmarks, use a different web browser or even a different computer, bookmarks quickly become a pain.
Sure, there are ways around this — in Firefox you can save your bookmarks in one big local web page as a list. Put that on a flash drive or publish it to a web site and away you go. But what if you have a bunch of bookmarks you want someone else to see, but they are in the middle of your huge bookmark file along with a lot of private links? Now you have to do extra work to get those bookmarks wrangled in a format your friend can use.
Here is another scenario: What if you pride yourself on always finding very cool web stuff that your friends love. You started out mailing links out to a group of friends, but some people didn’t like all they mail they were getting. So you switch to blogging your finds — now your friends can tune in to your blog when they want, or refer back to a particular entry later. Good stuff! But there’s a problem. Your blog doesn’t have a search feature! Or maybe one of your friends saw a link that was awesome but they totally can’t remember the web site name or anything that your blog search picks up!
Enter social bookmarking. Web sites designed to address particular bookmarking needs have been around for a few years now, and each site has a slightly different goal or methodology in mind on how to organize and publish your bookmarks. In the beginning, web sites like blink and backflip were basically web-based bookmark repositories. A site like del.icio.us, however, was one of the first social bookmark sites and stays focused on a specific goal: To allow you to bookmark your stuff online, categorize it using tags, and (if you want) share those bookmarks with your friends. It also keeps track of how many times a particular URL has been bookmarked and shows that statistic as well. You can then search your own bookmarks for a word, phrase, or list bookmarks by a tag or collection of tags. You can also do that on all the public bookmarks on the site or on anyone else’s public bookmark collection.
So, at the core, a social bookmark site gives you a place to keep, tag (or organize), and search your bookmarks. Many of these sites offer more features as well. ma.gnolia is very similar to del.icio.us, but it takes a snapshot of each bookmarked page (where it can), so that if a particular page disappears off the net, there’s a good chance mag.nolia will have it saved.
Building on these popular features, and the rising popularity of news blogs (like slashdot), a new type of social bookmarking site emerged: Enter Digg and Stumbleupon. These sites leveraged the power of the internet-based user community to categorize and review web bookmarks (now more often called links) to show the relative popularity of particular web pages as well as providing archive and search ability. Digg, in fact, tries to offload the editor’s work on a news blogging site like slashdot, and allow articles to live and die by how popular they are to the Digg readership. Of course, this doesn’t make digg a great place to store all your bookmarks — but if you are a cool hunter or a newshound, this will appeal to you. Stumbleupon attempts to still provide a storage mechanism a la del.icio.us, along with robust ranking and snapshot capabilities.
There are other, similar services, such as MetaFilter and Technorati that take some or all of these concepts, and integrate thinks such as ping-backs and backlinks to evaluate the popularity of articles or even entire web sites. However, at that point we are going beyond the scope of this simple primer.