The New Community Rules

Chapter 9. Leaving Your Mark: How to Rock the Social Bookmarking Space

You find a website that you like and decide to save it to your Favorites. The next time you’re online, you can open your browser, navigate to your Favorites menu, and start accessing the pages you need easily. That’s the bookmarking most of us are familiar with. Social bookmarking takes that a step further by allowing users to save their bookmarks online to share with friends. As a plus, your bookmarks are accessible wherever you go and from any computer.

With social bookmarking, Internet users can store and organize their bookmarks publicly. Many applications take this functionality and extend it by allowing users to recommend bookmarks to friends and to label these bookmarks with certain identifiers, called tags. This mostly publicly available information can then be used for content discovery and understanding how others categorize content produced by web developers and companies.

A Timeline: The Past, Present, and Future

Bookmarking has gone through a pronounced evolution since its usefulness was first discovered. Whereas bookmarking was once a task for private use, it has since become increasingly social, and the future will likely see even greater integration of bookmarking in our everyday habits and web searches.

The Past: Bookmarking Without the Help of Social Sites

Once upon a time, you discovered a web page you knew you’d want to reference again and again. Chances are that if you wanted to keep tabs on that ...