What is Social Bookmarking?
For many years now, people have been using the internet as their primary source of information. Information on the internet is usually searched for by people, using search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. But these days, a lot of information on the internet is provided by individual users who either share, store or display to the world, their favorite sites or important links to websites and other information for the peer internet surfer’s benefit. This, in essence, is the concept of Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking can be seen as the adding, editing and sharing of one’s favorite websites or links to important and informative links that can be of specific help to many people in one’s circle. That bookmarked pages are displayed on a single platform for everyone to see. This is different from file sharing in that users do not transfer a huge amount of data among themselves. They just share bookmarks that serve as a reference to the page they want the world to see.
Social Bookmarking Services
There are many websites that revolve around the idea of Social Bookmarking. These websites serve as social platforms to share web links to the world. These websites are known as Social Bookmarking Services. The idea of shared online bookmarks was originated in 1996 in the form of ‘ItList’, a website that allowed saving private and public bookmarks. This concept has grown since and now we have popular Social Bookmarking services like Twitter and Reddit.
Benefits of Social Bookmarking
One important purpose that Social Bookmarking serves is sharing of useful, relevant and happening information with the public. In other ways, it provides a medium for bloggers or writers to showcase their content to the world helping gain exposure. Social Bookmarking Services aid in creating ‘back links’ to the user’s website or article in order to generate traffic. Another very important advantage is that Social Bookmarking has evolved to achieve, is the status of being a Social Search Engine.
From Social Bookmarking to Social Search Engine
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! make use of computers to search, index and display results based on the query posted by the user. This indexing is done by following definitive algorithmic patterns. While these patterns are good for scourging through large amounts of data, they suffer to deliver specific information that is in line with the user’s query. So a lot of filtering is ultimately left to the user who has to search page after page to find content that is relevant to the query. This is where Social Bookmarking has excelled. The social bookmarking sites cover trending topics and provide more relevant information in accordance with the time, as many other users search through the internet for the same query. Many social bookmarking websites allow votes over links posted by other users to give an idea as to how good or how informative they are. This essentially filters most of the content on the web, creating a database that is both unique and useful in providing relevant information. Thus users needing specific information can easily filter them from posts in social bookmarking sites. In this way, social bookmarking services have come to define a better way of acquiring information online. It is of the people, by the people and for the people.
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