Social Bookmarking

First let’s look at what social bookmarking is.  As we all know there are computer programs that are used in order to find certain data—keywords—that will result in tags.  Tags are pieces of information that will help a computer to find that certain piece of information. So, in essence bookmarking is the practice of making tags.

Now in the above paragraph we stated that there are computer programs that are used in order to find data via tags, well now let’s imagine that the job of bookmarking is done entirely by a human and not a computer. A collection of such tags is referred to as a folksonomy.

When you go to YouTube, for instance, and are performing a search for a certain subject, we’ll say cats for instance, you are using their folksonomy to narrow down your search from perhaps “pets” to solely “cats.”

If you look at a blog, the author of that blog may have manually added their chosen tags to a post along with putting it into a category. Let’s say for instance that a certain post fits the tags of baseball and autographed. Thus each of those tags will point to that particular blog.  From there of course a program tracks the blog entries too and the entries are automatically connected and you are pointed to a certain list containing those blog entries. 

So, now you may be getting the idea how picking out your own tags might be used to manipulate data so that it’s readily found, but let’s go further into homonyms.  Homonyms are words that are spelled the same but may carry different meanings entirely. For instance bark.  One is the sound that a dog makes, the other is the outer covering of a tree. Using your own bookmarking may make a difference in how a search engine directs people to your site if you can arrange the data by meaning and not homonyms that do not fit in your category.

A special group ordinarily will use social bookmarking with similar interests. So the users save the links to certain web pages that are within the group’s interest.

Let’s try to make this clearer for you.  Assume that you are interested in car restoration. Doing a search for car restoration will literally bring up millions of sites through the search engine.  Instead of wading through this avalanche of information, you join a social bookmarking “club” if you will? Once you’ve joined, you may then begin to bookmark.  Not only do you bookmark but you also make up tags for each bookmark.  For example you might make a bookmark for car parts, antique car parts, 1950 Chevy parts, and finally one for radiators.  Now, remember that all the people who belong to this “club” are interested in rebuilding cars, thus you can see just how interested they’d be to view your bookmarks, and of course you are just as interested in seeing theirs.

Making money from bookmarking using the instance above would be very clear to you if you owned an antique car parts store, right?  Obviously you will need to register first with a social bookmarking site (remember it’s a “club”) or sites to use this great tool.

We also can take social bookmarking one-step further.  Because it is a “social” group, that means that theoretically all are definitely involved in the same interest, in this case antique car restoration. Each service will indicate the “members” of this similar interest group, in other words like-minded individuals, who then can make a social connection with each other to discuss antique car restoration. As in all things involving computers the social connection will grow exponentially each time you reach someone in your group.  Surely you’ve heard that “word of mouth” is the best advertising any business can do?  Well, this is as close to “word of mouth” advertising as you can find online!

As with anything, there is also a negative side to social bookmarking. Keep in mind that social bookmarking is created solely by amateurs. The social bookmarking sites do not watch how the resources that people add are properly organized and tagged. At times the tags are not properly sequenced or an important tag is left out. Also, be aware that you are responsible for your own maintenance and any updates.