Marko @ X10 - A web producer blog: Social Bookmarking??? (Part I.)

Hello fellow bloggers!

Today I'd like to steer your attention towards something that becomes more and more popular, and is commonly known as "Social Bookmarking".

Most of you are probably familiar with the standard bookmarking. The latest research suggests that there are approximately one gazillion websites out there (source: Wikipedia), but who can remember even only 1% of that?
Standard bookmarking is a nice and easy way to save our favorite web addresses and easily access them from within our browser.

One of the limitations of the standard bookmarking is that all your bookmarks are stored locally on only one computer. Have you ever lost all your bookmarks because you had to crash your PC? I went through that several times. Another classic: You hang out at your friend's house, really wanting to show him that funny website, but you can't because you don't find the web address, and your bookmarks are on your PC at home.

For these reasons (and more) some people started to save their bookmarks online. ITlist.com was the first in 1996 that offered an online bookmarking service. Soon online bookmarking became competitive and other providers like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, entered the market. Early in the game online bookmarks could be categorized, searched and shared with other users. The categorization reached a new level when people started "tagging" their bookmarks.

Tagging simply means that you can associate certain keywords with your bookmark. For www.x10.com for example, a "Home Automation" tag would be likely.

Now, in a social bookmarking system people store whole lists of bookmarks, tag them (categorize them by keywords), and them share them with other people. The advantage of such a system is huge!

Where before often machines (Search Engine Bots, etc) categorized online content, it is now users like you and me, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource.

Additionally, web users can get somewhat of an idea about the quality of a website, because naturally only the better websites get bookmarked a lot. This makes social bookmarking networks a real alternative to traditional search engines, that have much more complicated ways to determine the quality of a web resource. In fact, I believe social bookmarking will grow in an exorbitant manner for exactly this reason.
Think of it: Who knows better what you're interested in, than other users with the same interests?

I don't want to leave out some of the bugs of social bookmarking. The biggest bug being the uncontrolled tagging. I mean there is no standard set of keywords, so that people often use very different keywords for the same website. But with the providers growing, I am convinced it is only a question of time until these issues will be addressed.

Tomorrow in Social Bookmarking Part II., I'd like to tell you a bit more about those social bookmarking networks and their services.

Have Fun!

Marko @ X10 - A web producer blog

A blog about my work, everything X10 and more... Join in!

Social Bookmarking??? (Part I.)

TrackBack

Comments

Post a comment