What is Social Bookmarking and Why Should You Care?

Social bookmarking is an extension of the idea of being able to save bookmarks or favorite web pages in a simple directory. Every web browser has a bookmarking feature since the early days of the internet.

Social bookmarking takes it a step up and allows you to save your bookmarks on a web site. Now, no matter where you are in the world, provided that you have access to the internet, you can get to all of your book marks. Way cool! Another very nice feature is the ability to share your bookmarks with your friends and the entire internet community.

From that humble beginning social bookmarking has grown to allow registered users add public bookmarks, associate tags with the bookmarks and vote on the quality of the bookmarked web page. The most popular bookmarks usually featured on the home page of the bookmarking site. Very cool!

There are some sites that the owner's or editors of the site control what shows up on their home page. They select the 'quality' bookmarks that the community should see. I don't agree with that stance. I think they should let the community vote and the favorites that get the most votes should be on the home page.

As the sites have matured they have added some nice features, such as the ability to export and import book marks. As a user you will be notified of favorites that you have voted on or added into the system when they are voted on or when someone adds new tags to them.

For all of the nice things that social bookmarking gives us there are some problems in this part of the internet.

The language on the site is quite informal. Sometimes it borders on childish, you know like middle school or maybe high school language. Kids now-a-days have created their own sub culture language that can be difficult for other's to decode, especially if they are into text messaging. They tend to use the text messaging short hand in all of their day to day writings.

The really big problem is spam and corruption. Due to its popularity people who practice search engine optimization attempt to game the system by trying to run up their webpage's bookmark.

For all of its faults it is a pretty powerful tool where people do find and bookmark web pages [http://www.simpy.com/user/megansmithe/links] which have not been found by the search engines. With real people ranking and apply tags to the book marks it improves the quality of the links.