Social Bookmarking

In a social bookmarking system, users store links to web pages that they find useful. The users categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. These lists can be made accessible by the owner to other users of that bookmarking system. Other users with similar interests can search and view the links in the system by topic, category, or tags. The results of these searches are usually more useful to the user than those conducted using traditional search engines on the web.

"Technorati" and "del.icio.us" are examples of social bookmarking sites. Click here to read the "del.icio.us" explanation of social bookmarking.

Some social bookmarking tools enable users to bookmark a site in multiple social bookmarking sites at once, e.g., the "socialmarker" shown below and also in the left hand column of this site.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Commoncraft made this video because they wanted people to see the power of social bookmarking and how it makes web pages easy to remember, organize and share.

 


Digg

"Digg is a community-based website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg