Are you a Social Bookmarker?

There is so much information out there on the web. Finding information, saving it according to tags, and sharing it with others, is an easier task thanks to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites have grown in popularity. Delicious may be the one that is the most familiar but there are many more social bookmarking sites now on the web. Here is a list of the top 10 according to eBizMBA.



































When you register with a social bookmarking site, you can collect your favorite bookmarks, store, and organize them according to tags. Unlike traditional bookmarking that required you to use your own browser and save your favorites to only one computer, social bookmarking makes it easy for you to save your favorites to a website that you can access from anywhere.

Tagging your bookmarks categorizes them with short key words that describe your site and sorts them accordingly. Your bookmarks are usually public (unless you state otherwise) and you can share your bookmarks with users who are interested in the same information. You can build your own community with your family, friends, or coworkers. Bookmarking sites enable you to access the links that other users have tagged as their favorites to find information that also interests you.

I have recently created an account in Delicious to tag sites that are relevant to my coursework in Technical Communication. The sites that are the most useful to me contain pertinent information on blogging, web design, and writing in general. I often bookmark articles or sites that I will need to refer back to when I am writing on my blog or working on other assignments.


Some social bookmarking sites create a tag cloud that becomes larger as more people use the same tag. This is referred to as a folksonomy which is a ground up (created by users) way of cataloguing information. In a folksonomy, there are unlimited ways to tag the same information. Which is different from a hierarchy, that is top down, with only one way to classify material.

In Delicious, blue tags are tags you have in common with everyone else.

This new way of sharing information raises an interesting question from my current Professor, Mr. Ken Ronkowitz " Is social bookmarking a democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web or is it a disorganized collection of personal preferences?" In many ways it is both. There is a democratic theme that everyones' ideas count and they are free to tag any information they choose. However, it is not a error-proof system. Information that is not tagged according to the masses or misspelled will be lost.

Does popularity of the content necessarily make it the best or the most useful? The top box office movies are not always the best movies. So in some respects, social bookmarking is a collection of personal preferences or tastes that you consider to be significant. However, finding material can be much easier if you look for it through the tagging system. It can also be beneficial if you establish or join a network of your peers and gather websites and articles collectively on the same topic. Then the preferences are the same and tagging may be consistent.

New Web 2.0 features have provided us numerous ways to organize information. So where will all of this interactive sharing and gathering take us in the future? Will Web 3.0 offer new ways to use it? I guess we will have to just wait and see.