So you want to add social bookmarking to your website. After all, it’s the next big thing according to all the hype you’ve been hearing. But what exactly is social bookmarking, and how does it stand to benefit your website?

Before you jump in, eyes wide shut, ensure you know everything there is to know about the technology and its benefits from a marketing perspective.

The series of articles that follow will present a detailed look at the technology and how it can be used to benefit you and your company.

Bare essentials

So what is social bookmarking? To get a better understanding of what it is, you need to understand what bookmarking itself is. Bookmarking involves saving a url of a web page on your computer in order to view it later. Social bookmarking on the other hand involves saving the urls to a public website and “tagging” them with keywords. In order to create a collection of bookmarks, a user must register at a social bookmarking website, where users can store their collection, choose to make it private or public and assign keywords to them according to preference.

What’s the competition?

Social bookmarking isn’t an extremely new concept, it dates back to 1996 with the launch of iList. However, over the next three years it grew more effective with commercially backed ventures like BackFlip, Blink, Flip 2, Hotlinks, Quiver and other emerging websites. However, without the proper modesl for generating revenue and marketing, most of these companies burst with the dot-com bubble. The rejuvenation of social bookmarking appeared in the form of the contemporary concept of tagging instigated by oneview in 1999 and de.licio.us in September, 2003. Other sites include de.lirio.us, the open source equivalent to de.licio.us and citeulike, a site for academic papers.

The Cogs & Kinks

So how does social bookmarking work? In a social bookmarking system, users store links they find useful to share with others. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags or user-generated keywords of their own preference to it resulting in an amateur route to classifying information. These lists are often publically accessible since visitors can view the general information of the creator along with other bookmarked lists and in this way, can easily make social connections with people on just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag, assign a rank, and search for all resources assigned to that tag. In this way, the community of users develops a unique structure of keywords that is used to define a resource, a concept referred to as folksonomy.

Pop Goes The Weasel

Where is this technology headed and how long will it last? That’s a good question. The dawn of the 21^st century saw the dot-com bubble burst, so how do you know this is a solid investment? The ideas that social bookmarking is bringing forward, are already being implemented elsewhere in other applications. For instance, the concept of tagging is being incorporated into email and multimedia files. This shift away from formal taxonomies may drastically impact the way user communties are created and how they function. As the canvas for online resources change, the very way databases are designed and information is stored may need to be changed to incorporate the new methodologies.

All that Glitters Ain’t Gold

How can social bookmarking benefit you? The system has prime advantages over the more traditional resource classification models, like search engine spiders for instance. See the Related Articles for added references. Since all tag-based classifications of Internet resources are done by users, they are parsed by human beings who understand the content of the resources as opposed to computerised algorithms. In addition, as more and more users bookmark the same resource, the rank of the resource will increase, which is arguably a better yardstick compared to more traditional methods where rank is increased by the number of external links pointing to a website.

Tagging information with keywords has the potential of changing the way information is stored and shared. It has become less important where information is found and more important how to retrieve it and share it with a vast community of peers or students, in a commercial or educational network.

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