The rise of social bookmarking and tagging

Storing, classifying and sharing information has reached a new level altogether with social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a method in which internet users save links to web pages that can be shared publicly or privately with access limited only to a certain group or limited number of people.

The people can then view these bookmarks in a chronological order or via the tags that mark them. Ever since iList.com was started in 1996, there have been several social bookmarking networks on the internet that have risen and fallen.

These companies include Backflip, Blink, Clip2 etc. But it was more recently in 2004 that the term social bookmarking was coined and del.icio.us brought the concept of tagging into the World Wide Web. Since then social bookmarking has been on the rise.

Why it works

It works because it has several advantages when compared with the more traditional automated resource location software.

Search engine spiders for example, use algorithms to determine the meaning of a resource or a web page and then bring it up on the results page.

On the other hand, all tagging is done manually and hence can give much better and streamlined results. As a result you will find semantically classified tags in a social bookmarking system.

Also as a resource is bookmarked by more and more people, its popularity increases and the resource is then ranked by the system based on its utility.

So, the chances that the end user will benefit from it are much higher as compared to a conventional search engine ranking system which ranks pages according to the external links pointing towards it.

The flipside

On the other hand, social bookmarking and tagging has its own set of drawbacks as well. Since there is no fixed vocabulary or spelling checks, tags are found to have errors and unclear tags are common.