Anyone for Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is an exciting and quite powerful tool of Web 2.0. The system through which internet users can save, share, organize and search web pages is known as social bookmarking. Users can save links to (or ‘bookmark’) their favourite web pages. They can do so for their own use or for sharing with an e-community – an online community of people or groups. The individual concerned or the persons who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them as lists or tags arranged either by chronology or by category or both.

Social Bookmarking Websites

In order to create social bookmarks, one needs to sign up with a social bookmarking website. Social bookmarking websites are sites which allow users to save their favourite web pages as bookmarks by adding tags of their own making. Individual bookmarks can be designated the status of public or private entities. Moreover, there are some bookmarking sites that keep checking the saved URLs from time to time and let the user know when a particular link has stopped functioning.

Visitors to a social bookmarking site can search for content through a number of registers such as keywords, tags, recency and popularity. Social bookmarking is a secular service, open to one and all.

Major Players in the Social Bookmarking Field

In the web world, social bookmarking is quite a recent phenomenon. It dates back a couple of years from now when sites like del.icio.us and furl came up. At present, numerous social bookmarking sites have mushroomed the internet, each with their own unique features. Some major names in this field today are digg, reddit, linkroll, de.lirio.us (an open source version of del.icio.us), technorati, blogcatalog, bloghub, citeulike and simpy.

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

• Users can access their bookmarks more easily as the tags are all generated by themselves.

• Users can access their bookmarks from any computer in the world.

• Users can collaborate with each other by sharing important information.

• Users can promote their business amidst millions of people across the globe.

• Users can direct more traffic towards their websites.

• The link popularity of a particular website rises as search engines do index these incoming links to it.

Are you game?