Social Bookmarking Primer

Anyone who’s heard the buzzword, social bookmarking, has probably had a little interest in the subject. We’ve all heard of bookmarking – the process of saving useful websites and links for later use; but what is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is like the public version of private, browser-based bookmarking. In the former, a website serves as an intermediary for people to post, classify, store, and search for bookmarks. Bookmarks are synonymous with web pages, websites, or links on social bookmarking sites because every item on the site is, by definition, already bookmarked. Anyone can post new bookmarks, add short tags to describe them, and search for more bookmarks within the website.

Social bookmarking has several advantages over traditional ways to find web sites such as search engines and directories. Search engines use search engine spiders that utilize advanced algorithms to categorize and rank websites, web pages, documents, miscellaneous files, and links. Directories use editors that approve, disapprove, and categorize newly submitted websites. The best of both worlds are seen in social bookmarking websites because humans add and categorize links, and the website’s own search engine searches through the links when called upon by any user. Sometimes, the results are more relevant because the system ranks bookmarks according to how many people have bookmarked it, as opposed to how many links are pointing to it or the keyword content of the page. There are few ways to trick the website because so many people are adding and confirming bookmarks.

The disadvantages of social bookmarking lie in the ability for people to use corruption, spam, and collusion to influence their website’s rankings on the social bookmarking site. Spammers may submit their site multiple times or tag it repeatedly in the chances that the search engines will likely see it as a worthwhile link. Spammers make it tough on everybody.

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