What is Social Bookmarking?
Have you ever come across a website that you just know a friend or family member would love and e-mailed a link to them? If so, you have participated in social bookmarking.
Social Bookmarking refers to web based applications that enable us to store bookmarks online instead of in our favourites or bookmarks on our computers. The immediate advantage of this is that we can access our bookmarked sites from any computer and you can easily share them with friends.
Why Social Bookmark?
When you are searching for information online, most of us will turn to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to deliver web pages that match what you’re looking for. Search engines, however, are not always the best way of finding what you want on the web. Anyone that has ever waded through page after page of search engine results hoping that they will eventually stumble on the elusive website can vouch for that.
Social bookmarking brings to the table something that search engines will never be able to compete with - the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.
What Can Social Bookmarking Do For Me?
Social Bookmarking sites are now being used as intelligent search engines. Not only can you save your favourite websites access them anywhere and send them onto your friends and family, you can also look at sites that other people have found interesting enough to bookmark. The majority of social bookmarking sites will allow you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like blogging, sports, shopping, travel, news, etc.
Social bookmarking has the benefit of allowing you to be specific and target what you want to see. As opposed to using a search engine, typing something in and searching for a needle in a haystack you can quickly narrow your search down to exactly what you are looking for.
History of Social Bookmarking
The concept of sharing online bookmarks has been around for some time now and dates back to April 1996 with the launch of the first social bookmarking site itList. Over the next three years of so competition began to heat up with companies such as Backflip, Blink and Clip2, and others entering the market. However it wasn’t until 2003 that del.icio.us entered the market and coined the term social bookmarking.
Conclusion
Social Bookmarking is set to be the next big thing in online marketing and the best thing about it is its free! Social bokmarking is used as part of search engine optimisaion campaigns but the general idea of social bookmarking is humans spreading the word about products and businesses they like or find useful which helps us all to navigate a clearer path through the world wide web.
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