Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method used on the Internet in order to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users do not need to download the content of the resource. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that can become a folksonomy.

Users are able to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders by using this social bookmark. They can also view another 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.

On one hand, social bookmarking method has several advantages which are the following:

• It has search engine spiders that permits people find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed.
• All tag-based classification of Internet resources is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which only determine the meaning of a resource.
• A social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

On the other hand, social bookmarking also have some disadvantages:

• There is no standard set of keywords, no standard for the structure of such tags, mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags.

• Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion as some users have started considering it as a tool to use along with search engine optimization in order to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found.

• Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags making developers to have to adjust their security system to overcome abuses.

Sources of information

Social bookmarking. (2010, July 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:10, July 21, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_bookmarking&oldid=374508287