The idea of Bookmarking is very simple and everyone has used it at some point. Standard bookmarking is simply a method of storing a link in your browsers bookmarks or favorites folder for you to visit later on. Sometimes you also supply a little description.
Social Bookmarking is simply taking the existing bookmark function used in browsers, and making it sharable with other people, or “Social”. You’re still doing exactly the same thing: storing the URL of a site, and sometimes supplying a small description.. but now you’re sharing it with a community of other people. To organize all the bookmarks, you and other users can tag or label bookmarks. This means that other people can search for that particular label or tag to find your bookmark along with other related results. Furthermore, you and other users can rate bookmarks using either a simple “Good” & “Bad” system, or a 1 to 5 gold stars system, or something similar. These fundamental rules mean that Social Bookmarking sites develop and evolve into huge repositories of links where the junk is lost and only the best survive but only ever for a short period of time. To understand why Social Bookmarking is so popular and where it came from, we have to take a look back at the history of the web.
Since the dawn of the internet people have always been trying to find something, trying to find a website to sell them tickets to a game, book a restaurant for tomorrow night, find statistical data on the African Swallow or whatever they need or are interested in. In the very early years, people would find websites by typing in the URL or web address alone, and there were no reference points and very little organization or reference points which made it difficult to find what you wanted.
Soon, directories showed up. Directories were simply repositories of web addresses, usually with a short description about the site, and usually filed under various categories. While these did their job and worked well, sometimes it was hard to target exactly what you needed and instead you’d have to troll through lists of sites to find one that matched your criteria. Some directories solved the problem by adding a search function.
This ushered in the age of the Search Engine. Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos and others became solely dedicated to searching lists of sites and allowed a user to find any of the sites stored in their database by searching for keywords. They would reference these keywords with those stored in the tags of each web page like the , and tags. Over the years webmasters adapted to target the meta tag and move up the ranks and the importance of meta tags faded and importance was placed instead on lots of factors like the text on the page, words highlighted in bold or in title tags like <h1> and <h2>. The websites and webmasters reacted by using their keywords in these tags and saturating their pages with certain phrases. In turn Google invented PageRank which is much more accurate at telling a pages worth and value. It looks at the usual factors like the text of the page and the words, but it also looks at incoming links to the page and the rank of the sites where the link is from. In reaction webmasters have started to buy or create links en-masse and again Google falls behind in the digital arms race.
As you can see webmasters have been continually trying to find new ways to rank at the top of the Search Engines, and employ various honest or dishonest methods to do so and the Search Engines have been trying to find new ways to get a more accurate reading and get valuable and interesting pages to the front. But the effectiveness of search engines seems to be fading, they seem to be losing the edge and the sites who use the most tactics get to the front pages win while sometimes genuinely useful websites never make it.
This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. Social Bookmarking sites are simply another way of finding web pages and information on the internet. The difference being that instead of searching by keywords, or by categories, sites are organized by tags and ratings. Instead of a crawler or spider looking at incoming links and judging (often wrongly) how well the page should rank, human beings mark the sites they like and those they don’t.
To get to the first page of search engines like Google, you need to worry about your incoming links, your page title, meta tags, the text on your page, and more. Whereas with Social Bookmarking sites the only thing that matters is that people like your site, and that you have useful, unique content. This simple rule means that the good pages, articles and links rise to the top, and the useless, repetitive or uninteresting pages sink to the bottom. This concept is what has catapulted Social Bookmarking into the spotlight as the new best thing and why such a large, continually growing number of people now use them.