Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly. For the reading-related term, see bookmark (books). ... A screenshot of a web page. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks. For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ...

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. A typical web feed logo A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. ...

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.^[1] A Web annotation is an online-annotation associated with a Web resource (typically a Web page). ... Not to be confused with social network services such as MySpace, etc. ...

History

The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market^{[citation needed]}. Lacking viable models for making money, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst. Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ...

Founded in late 2003, del.icio.us pioneered tagging^[2] and coined the term "social bookmarking". In 2004, as del.icio.us began to take off, Connotea (focusing on social bookmarking for scientists), Simpy, Furl, and Stumbleupon were released, and Netvouz in 2005. In 2006, Ma.gnolia and Diigo also entered the bookmarking field. Sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine are a related type of web service that provides a system for social news. In 2007, IBM announced plans to enter the social software market, and the BBC web site added social bookmarking links for its news and sport articles,^[3] like many other news websites had done earlier. The website del. ... For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ... The Connotea Homepage Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists, created in December 2004 by Nature Publishing Group. ... SimPy is a process-based, object-oriented discrete-event simulation language. ... Furl (from File Uniform Resource Locators) is a free social bookmarking website (furl. ... Stumbling redirects here. ... Netvouz is a social bookmarking service for storing and sharing web bookmarks developed by Henrik Sjöstrand. ... Diigo is a website which allows users to bookmark and tag websites. ... Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. ... Reddit is a social news website where users can post links to content on the web. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... IBM Lotus Connections is a proprietary Web-based social software application distributed by the Lotus Software division of IBM. Lotus Connections is, according to IBM, ...social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and... For other uses, see BBC (disambiguation). ...

Advantages

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. ... For the search engine of the same name, see WebCrawler. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it. In mathematics a metric or distance function is a function which defines a distance between elements of a set. ... Economics and commerce define an end-user as the person who uses a product. ...

Disadvantages

There are drawbacks to such tag-based systems as well: no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and "personalized" tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese). Services which allow both tags and folders for organizing bookmarks (such as Netvouz) make this less of a problem though. Controlled vocabularies are used in indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. ... Synonyms (in ancient Greek, συν (syn) = plus and όνομα (onoma) = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings. ... Look up Antonym in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A hierarchy (in Greek: , derived from — hieros, sacred, and — arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is a subordinate to a single other element. ... Netvouz is a social bookmarking service for storing and sharing web bookmarks developed by Henrik Sjöstrand. ...

Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion.^[4] Due to its popularity, some users have started considering it as a tool to use along with Search engine optimization to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, hence obliging the developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses. Because of this, some social bookmarking websites were forced to add CAPTCHA protection against spam, which caused some problems for people who use social bookmarking for non-spamming purposes.^{[citation needed]} A typical search results page Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (organic or algorithmic) search results. ... This article is about spam, the abuse of electronic communications media to send unsolicited bulk messages. ... Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the EZ-Gimpy program, were used on Yahoo. ...

See also

• Collaborative tagging
• List of social software
• List of social bookmarking sites
• Semantic Web
• Social networking
• Social software
• Collaborative bookmarking
• Bookmark manager

Collaborative tagging is regarded as democratic folksonomy metadata generation, i. ... This is a list of notable social software: selected examples of social software products and services that facilitate a variety of forms of social human contact. ... This is a list of notable social software: selected examples of social software products and services that facilitate a variety of forms of social human contact. ... W3Cs Semantic Web logo The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and... A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. ... It has been suggested that History of social software be merged into this article or section. ... // Introduction Collaborative bookmarking extends social bookmarking into the business arena, with the addition of project groups to allow users to collaborate across boundaries. ... Bookmark can refer to: Bookmark (books): A marker used to keep ones place in a printed work. ...

Footnotes and references