Guide to Social Bookmarking

Unlike the pages of a book, Internet pages are intangible. As a result, they must be bookmarked in an intangible way. Social bookmarking tools provide Internet users with a means to identify websites that pique their interest. Since the Internet is a social platform, these bookmarking devices allow users to easily alert their friends to their finds and to share common interests.

Accessibility

Since social bookmarks are stored within Internet databases, they are easily accessible from any place where an Internet connection is available. Certain private social bookmarking websites require users to log in to view their bookmarks, while other sites offer users the option to make their bookmarks publicly viewable or viewable by invitation only. By their very nature, these bookmarks are intended to encourage socialization, so most users opt to make their bookmarks publicly viewable.

Tags

Much like annotations, tags are words or phrases that users can append to any content they choose to bookmark. Later, users can search through all of the bookmarks in their collection on the basis of these tags. To a certain extent, tags reveal how the Internet is perceived by its users. Applications exist online that allow users to automatically generate tags, but most tags are generated by hand. This process may be time consuming and requires a user to carefully consider the terms being used in the tags in order to facilitate recall or to distinguish certain bookmarks from others.

Search Engine Optimization

Social bookmarking is often used as a tool to improve the website's online visibility and to increase its incoming traffic. Communities of Internet users debate whether implementing SEO techniques substantially increases the volume of traffic that a website receives. If a user routinely bookmarks his pages of his own websites, without supporting content produced by others or substantially contributing to a social network, his bookmarks are likely to be deemed self-promotional "spam" and consequently deleted by managers of social bookmarking websites.

Networking

In addition to functioning as bookmarking tools, many popular applications such as Twitter and Stumbleupon provide social networking opportunities to their users. Networking options include email, RSS feeds, forums or instant messaging capabilities. Rather than to post laborious URL codes to sites of interest, users can post active links that may be represented by screen shots of the websites to which they are related. Thus, users are able to casually stimulate one another's interest in content they have discovered on the Internet.

Widgets

Tiny buttons appended to the end of a blog post that invite a reader to share the article with others on social bookmarking sites are known as widgets. These widgets are usually discrete in nature, often containing representations of icons for popular social bookmarking sites. They are available for download by content producers, and they may allow users to simultaneously bookmark a single online document to a multitude of social bookmarking websites.

References

• 125 Social Bookmarking Sites : Importance of User Generated Tags
• Social Bookmarking and SEO
• Add This: Bookmarking and Sharing Service