Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
To use social bookmarking, the first thing that you need to do is to create a profile for yourself on a social bookmarking website. With the help of social bookmarking, you can store information about any website that you want to remember and/or share with others. These bookmarks are most of the times public but in case you desire, you can even save them as private. You even have the option of sharing them with a certain group of people or just few specified individuals. These selected people can see your bookmarks in an alphabetical order, by category or through a search engine. Another facility that most of the social bookmark services provide is that you can organize your bookmarks with the help of self-created tags. This is far better than the browser-based function of folders and tags.
When you go to the social bookmarking site, you can have a look at the articles marked by others also. You can look for the articles that are tagged with your favorite topic’s keyword. This way you will get a list of many articles tagged by others on your favorite topic. This way you get to know some like-minded people and can make friends with them too. Social bookmarking is the perfect way to share your favorite things from around the Internet and you even get to know about a lot of new things at the same time.
When you have a web page or website that you want people to visit then you can tag it using keywords and submit it to the social bookmarking websites. This will make it possible for people interested in the similar topic as your keyword, to come to your site. Many marketers are using these sites to sell products from their websites too.
