What the heck is Social Bookmarking?

The fact that 'Humans are social beings', animals rather, is still reverberating in my head... Afterall, during my times as a kid in a primary school - or anybody's time in that phase for that matter - I didn't know the best way to escape from this balderdash coming straight from the horse's mouth, the hooved quadruped being the Social Science teacher, was as simple as catnapping ( But it would be altogether different matter if I were ever to be caught napping then!! So if any kids do read this piece de resistance of an ad'vice' from me, please don't try this at your school! )

Jokes apart, the recent spate of Social Networking sites, Orkut, MySpace, Multiply... just to name a few, is a manifestation of this social behavior of humans. These sites have caught the attention of the large online community in a big way, and boy-o-boy, aren't they addictive? It has revolutionized the way we live, seamlessly integrating our business needs and friendship with people from far away lands, and not to mention, the near ones too... ( I for one figure on my neighbor's friend list on Orkut! )

Social bookmarking, too is a revolutionary Web 2.0 concept just like Social Networking. The Wikis, the blogs, the Social Networks, all come under the broad spectrum of Web 2.0

Social bookmarking is a web-based service to share Internet bookmarks.The Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of folksonomy techniques on the Internet or Intranet.

Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of Social News Sites like Reddit.

In other words, Social bookmarking is an answer to the more-often-than-not erratic search results that turn up today when you query for information on a search engines like Google or Yahoo. People have found a clever way past the Algortihms of these search engines to get a good front page ranking for their Websites - sites which consist only of promotions and advertisements, sites which aren't related to your query even in the remotest sense.

Agreed, people can still rig around Social Bookmarks for personal benefits, but the fact that there will be many more people reviewing your claims will automatically 'bury' your fraudulent information. So think if Social bookmark as a VOTE, if you liked what you just read on a site, you could give it a positive feedback on these Social Bookmarking sites. In this way, not only can you do away with those messy bookmark tab on your web browser, but also help other users find quality information on the Web. Another plus is, there is no way you will loose your precious links in this case, you can always return to the site by bookmarking it online...

Functional Overview

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

Automatic notification

Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to web feeds (see RSS) based on tags, or collection of tag terms. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

Advantages

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

Many of the popular Social Bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon, Digg, del.ico.us, reddit... Let us take a sneak into what these amazing sites offer :

StumbleUpon :

StumbleUpon is a commercial web discovery service that integrates peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging. The Toolbar system automates the collection, distribution and review of web content within an intuitive social framework, providing users with a browsing experience that resembles "channel-surfing" the web. Users access the service via a browser toolbar; toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite and Internet Explorer.

StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering (an automated process combining human opinions with machine learning of personal preference) to create virtual communities of like-minded websurfers. Rating websites updates a personal profile (a blog-style record of rated sites) and generates peer networks of web surfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinate the distribution of web content, such that users 'stumble upon' pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. Users rate sites by way of a simple thumbs up, thumbs down selection on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and can optionally leave additional commentary for the site's review page, which also appears on the user's blog. This social content discovery approach automates the "word-of-mouth" referral of peer-approved websites and simplifies web navigation. Stumblers (as users of this community dub themselves) also have the ability to rate and review each others' blogs as well as join interest groups, which are community forums for specific topics. Users can post comments much like a discussion board in these groups and post websites that apply to the specific topic.

You could try this functionality by downloading a toolbar on your Web Browser, so the next time you feel like browsing, you can select your topic of choice and StumbleUpon will do the rest, taking you to relevant sites on your topic of choice.

Learn how to Stumble! Visit StumbleUpon

Digg :

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a variety of other categories such as politics and videos. 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. However, this democratic style has led to criticism that Digg is susceptible to ideological or commercial manipulation.

Functionality

Readers can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow users in the "digg/All/Upcoming" section of the site. Once a story has received enough "diggs", it appears on Digg's front page. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the "digg all" area, where it may eventually be removed.

Articles are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. All content and access to the site is free, but registration is compulsory for certain elements, such as promoting ("digging") stories, submitting stories and commenting on stories. Digg also allows for stories to be posted to a user's blog automatically when he or she diggs a story.

Visit Digg.com

del.ico.us :

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!.

A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

del.icio.us has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to surface interesting content and make the website an effective conveyor of popular internet memes and trends.

The web site's simple HTML interface with human readable URLs, novel domain name, as well as a REST API and RSS feeds for web syndication, have contributed to making it one of the most popular services of its kind.

Use of del.icio.us is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user's own data is freely downloadable through the API in an XML or JSON format, and can also be exported to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.

Everything posted to del.icio.us is publicly viewable by default, although a user can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; it is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections. Many people use the del.icio.us linkrolls, tagrolls and network badges to display their links and information on their weblogs. Others use the RSS feeds and "daily blog posting" feature to do this.

Visit del.ico.us

There are many more like Reddit, Yahoo MyWeb, which offer similar functionalities.

THAT'S ALL FOLKS! HAPPY BOOKMARKING!!