Social bookmarking is a technique for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. The concept behind this new trend is rather simple which the case with good ideas is often.
In a social bookmarking scheme, web users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with particular people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Web users keep a shared version of favorite sites online. This enables the most popular sites in a category to be identified.
Most social bookmark services persuade users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also allow viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, voting, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
For Further Reading: 7 things you should know about Social Bookmarking
Source: Wikipedia
