Social bookmarking is a way to store, classify, share and search links. In addition to general sites which store web page boomarks, there are sites which specialize in specific types of sites, such as shopping, music, wine, or videos. Social bookmarking is a convenient way to store links to websites independent of a specific computer or web browser, allowing one to access the same set of sites from home, work, or while on the road.
One feature of most social bookmarking sites is the capability to share sites with others and to categorize sites by tags or ratings. Therefore, they may be used to identify new sites from lists of links selected by others with similar interests.
The most significant advantage of bookmarking sites over search engines is that ratings and tags are assigned by people, rather than search engine crawlers. Disadvantages include the lack of standardized terminology for tags and no way of indicating relationships between tags.These disadvantages apply to most Internet sites, as well.
Social bookmarking has become increasingly popular over the past few years. Below are a few of the most popular or significant.
del.icio.us. Yahoo! Available: http://del.icio.us. Date of Visit: May 28, 2008.
A site for storing and sharing websites. Use tags to categorize sites, making it easy to sort and retrieve information from them.
digg. Available: http://digg.com. Date of Visit: May 28, 2008.
A site in which articles and websites are submitted by members and ranked by popularity. Emphasizes science and technology issues, but all subjects may be covered.
Furl. LookSmart. Available: http://furl.net. Date of Visit: May 28, 2008.
Store websites and assign "Topics" to categorize them. Sites may also be assigned a rating, keywords and personal comments, all of which may be of interest when sharing sites. Furl also saves a copy of the page bookmarked, so that it remains accessible, even if the page is modified or removed.
GiveALink.org. Indiana University. Available: http://www.givealink.org. Date of Visit: May 28, 2008.
Not a commercial site, but an academic research project with the goal of analyzing the structure and content of bookmark files in order to develop new web mining techniques. Bookmarks are arranged by the hierarchical structure of individual bookmark files with search capabilities.