What is Social Bookmarking ?

Social bookmarking is a way for many internet users to save, organize and manage web page addresses for future use. This is done with the help of metadata.

Meta Data :-

Metadata is basically data about data, or as the online dictionary states: "Information that describes the content, quality, condition, origin, and other characteristics of data or other pieces of information"

Social Situations :-

In a social bookmarking situation, users can store information about a certain websites they want to remember or share with others. These links can be shared publicly, privately or between members of a particular group.Most of the social bookmarking administrators encourage users to organize their links with tags that they themselves create. These are informal tags as opposed to the browser-based function of folders and tags.

History :-

The idea of social bookmarks dates all the way back to 1996 when iList was launched. Over the next several years, the concept would become more and more competitive. Then in 2003, del.icio.us created tagging and the rest as they say is history.

Pluses :-

As the practice of bookmarking has increased, search engines are recognizing the benefits of bookmarking over other web crawling techniques like spiders. Spiders are an automated program, which tries to determine the usefulness of a site based on algorithms. A bookmark however is an actual human being who has visited the site and determined that there is something of value content wise and would like to visit the site again in the future.

Minuses :-

The down side of this method of determining a sites usefulness is ironically the same as its strength. With human users, you have a variety of language uses, misspelling of words, antonym usage as well as many other issues. For instance a user may use similar and alternating tags for the same site and there is no mechanism to differentiate between them.