by Matthew Emerson

Created on: March 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 31, 2007

Social bookmarking sites are a very popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of folksonomy techniques on the Internet. Other than the web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations,etc. - can also be found on these sites. Social bookmarking is also part of social news sites.

The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years the online bookmark services became very competitive, with the venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink,Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the Social market.

In such social bookmarking system's, users store various lists of Internet resources that they have come to find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or to a specific network of such like aol or netscape for example, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly.

They also like to categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords and or tags. Most social bookmarking services will allow their users to search for and have access to bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of such particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just the wide-spred sharing of bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, and to create groups and social networks.

This system has several advantages over the traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by humans who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with the contemporary search engines.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they can find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked

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