Social bookmarking is a form of networking where users save and share links to internet content. Sites offer services with large communities, allowing users to tag and sort bookmarks. Submit functions allow users to draw attention to specific articles and sites. Examples include Delicious, Reddit, and Digg.
Social bookmarking is a method of networking in which users save and share links to Internet content they think may be of interest to others. It is among a large family of activities that people can engage in as a form of social networking. A number of sites offer social bookmarking services and some have very large and active communities. Many bloggers and other people who work online engage heavily in social bookmarking as a promotional tool and method of sharing information.
A user on a social bookmarking site identifies a link of interest and “bookmarks” or saves it with the site. Many of these sites have widgets that can be installed in a browser, allowing the user to click a single button to bookmark a page, rather than having to go to the social bookmarking site and paste the link. Clicking that button typically brings up a few options that the user can use to tag the content to make it easier to find.
An individual user on a social bookmarking site will have a list of links of interest which can be sorted by tags, dates and other parameters. This list can be publicly visible or private, in which case it can only be seen by friends. People browsing such sites can follow users who tend to find content of interest to them, and individual bookmarks can generate their own discussion pages where people talk about the content and share related links.
It is also possible to enable a submit function on a social bookmarking page. For example, a website dealing with feminist issues might invite users to submit links of feminist interest. This allows site users to draw the site owners attention to specific articles and sites that may be of interest to them. It also creates more opportunities for social networking, as other site users can see recommended links and explore both the links and the people who recommended them.
Delicious, Reddit, and Digg are examples of sites that provide social bookmarking services, along with collaborative tagging, where people add metadata for context. Tagging is useful, as users can search tags to find content related to a specific topic. Another aspect of social bookmarking can be link promotion, with links submitted by numerous people making it onto the front page for all to see, while less popular links get buried over time. Users who become known for posting interesting and popular links also rise in the site’s rankings.
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