Social Bookmarking - an overview

Quite simply social bookmarking is a system for keeping your Bookmarks or Favourites online as opposed to on your computer harddrive. The benefit being that you will always have access to your favourite websites no matter whether you are accessing the internet via your home PC, laptop or work computer.

You may have heard of the larger social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us or Digg and you more than likely have heard of Flickr. You may have noticed too that a lot of blogs now have links asking you to add their post to your favourite bookmarking site.

The reason social bookmarking is becoming so popular is because not only can you store the links to your favourite websites online but you can share them with others. The sites are usually set up in such a way that you have your own dedicated page to which you can add your bookmark, tag it with a keyword and add any comments you may want to make for future reference. The real benefit is that people share their bookmarks. The site can then rate the tags by popularity, you can see which categories people are most interested in and which websites/blogs/articles are being heavily bookmarked and must therefore be of interest. Browse the categories, click on a link that interests you and visit the site. You may then also want to bookmark it for yourself.

The really interesting consequence of all this activity is that social bookmarking is establishing itself as a serious alternative to the search engines as a way for people to find information on the internet. Instead of a computer robot using maths (all-be-it complex maths) to judge web content and deliver results to you based strictly on the keywords you enter, social bookmarking delivers content that is determined to be of value by a dynamic human element. Herein lies the beauty of this system as it invariable delivers interesting and unpredictable results due to the unstructured nature of the tagging system. The sites allow you to use your own keyword classification system to tag your bookmarks with, so conceivably an article on fractal art could be tagged by one person under "digital art" and under "complex mathematical formulas" by another. Imagine browsing the maths tag and coming across these beautiful works of art.

Thus my advice to you is to join the revolution and get involved with the sharing and discovering of information and inspiration, you never know what you might find.