Social Bookmarking: An Overview

Social Bookmarking allows you to advertise your websites to different social media. It involves sharing, organizing, searching, and managing the bookmarks of various web resources. Under this service, the users save the webpage links as they want to remember or share. The resources are not shared; however, you will find bookmarks. This concept is not a new one. Rather, it has been in the market for a long time but has gained popularity only recently as a form of promoting products and services.

History

Dating back to April 1996, the concept of the shared online bookmarks came into view with the launch of iList, which had features of both public and private bookmarks. The next three years saw launch of various online bookmark services that allowed users to organize and sort bookmarks in folders. It was in 2003 when Delicious coined the term "social bookmarking" and pioneered tagging. Since then, various popular sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine have joined the fray.

Advantages

There are a host of advantages of this service that have contributed to its popularity. These are illustrated as follows:

*Easy to Use: Social bookmarking is easy and user friendly. The users can access their personal bookmarks not only from their own computer from any computer that is hooked to Internet.
*Easy Sharing Of Bookmarks: This service is a great way to share your favorite bookmarks with your friends, family, and other colleagues. It is highly helpful in corporate structures too where it gets easier to collaborate about an important website.
*Marketing Tool: Social bookmarking not only helps us in sharing bookmarks with friends and family, but it also helps in catering to a much wider audience. They can comment, vote, and view their favorite bookmarks, thus, proving this service to be a great marketing tool.
*Human Cognition: This service provides access to a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers present across the world. These have been particularly for the libraries that find this as an easy way to provide lists of various informative links to patrons.

Disadvantages

Although the social bookmarking service is becoming highly popular due to its various advantages, there are some disadvantages too that can be highlighted as under:

*Informal Vocabularies: There is no standard set of keywords that need to be maintained and no standard for structure of tags leading to mis-tagging due to spelling errors, synonym/antonym confusion, and various other problems.
*Spam and Corruption: This service is susceptible to corruption and confusion. Due to this, more and more people are turning to another process, SEO or Search Engine Optimization, to make their websites more visible.
*No Standardized structure: Another disadvantage regarding this involves absence of any standardized structure with regards to subject headings and usage of singular or plural forms while tagging. Many a times the websites are not tagged at all. This can be quite frustrating for a normal user.

However, the advantages of this service far outweigh the disadvantages. Out of the numerous bookmarking sites available online, you have to select and use the one high on quality and the ones that are search engine friendly. This would ensure that your website is marketed properly.