Everyone is familiar with using a bookmark in your web browser, just a simple way to return to a web site with one click instead of having to retype the entire web address or URL. So, what is social bookmarking?
Instead of keeping your bookmarks on your local computer, you save them to an online account. You can share the bookmarks, tag them, and describe them for future reference. When you add a bookmark to your online account, you can see who else in the world has also saved that bookmark. You can see other bookmarks they have saved that relate to that bookmark. You can see what they said about the bookmark. In this way you can expand your network of related information.
Some online social bookmarking services, like del.icio.us or furl even allow you to send you saved bookmarks to friends or publish them to your blog.
You can tag your bookmarks. For example, a math website might be tagged DistributiveProperty or SubjectVerbAgreement. You can create bundles of tags. For example, the bundle name could be the name of a unit of study. All of the tags that relate to that unit of study could then be associated with that bundle.
Tags can be searched. Using these, you can find any bookmarks that other users around the world assigned the same tag. Tags can be shown in tag clouds which is a grouping of tags based on size and/or shade of color. The larger or darker the tag in the cloud, the more people are using or searching for it.
Wikipedia Link: Social Bookmarks
Related Wikipedia Links:
- Collaborative tagging
- List of social software
- List of social bookmarking sites
- Semantic Web
- Social networking
- Social software
- Collaborative Bookmarking
- Chipmark
- Bookmark manager
Dictionary.com Link: Bookmark
