Social Bookmarking – What is it?

What is social bookmarking? Have you ever added a website you may want to visit again as a favorite or bookmark on your computer? Social bookmarking is the method of saving and categorizing a specific site and sharing it with others through social bookmarking communities. Social bookmarking was started in 1996 with the creation of the website called itList.com. There are now a vast number of social bookmarking systems and communities available. Majority of social bookmarking communites give you the ability to construct your own description of the website you are bookmarking. Social bookmarking uses an organizational strategy known as tagging. The keywords used in the description of the website is called tags. They classify the website for the individual much like the heading in your bookmarks on your local computer does. This information is usually public but there are options to keep it private. The main purpose of social bookmarking is to keep track of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared and tagged by other users. Many people use social bookmarking to promote their websites and network. Social bookmarking systems provide feeds for your list of bookmarks including lists organized by the tags posted. Social bookmarking makes it easy to organize bookmarks or find particular blog posts also. Added features of social bookmarking sites have ratings listed and comments section on bookmarks for readers to post their thoughts.

There are many different social bookmarking sites available due to increased popularity and competition which offer various enhanced features to users. Stumble Upon lets users create groups, collectively rate, and tag websites with a thumbs up or down rating. While social bookmarking communities like Pixrat allows users to collect, organize, and share pictures on the web. The social bookmarking site ULinkx mainly focuses on allowing users to share and tag videos and music on the web. Scuttle permits users to run their own social bookmarking service locally on a board or school server. As one of the popular social bookmarking sites del.icio.us allows users to share favorites of most forms of media. Furl which is one of the first social bookmarking sites allows users to save copies of virtually any webpage. Reddit’s enhanced feature for its users is the instant sharing of content within the social bookmarking community. Yahoo owns My Web, which lets you instantly tap into the knowledge of people with related or completely new interests so you can share what they know.

Todd Mumford is an expert SEO, with over 8 years active experience in SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing, and can be found at his SEO Company website www.seovisions.com