Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage "bookmarks" of web pages. Users save links to web pages that they like or want to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored. Examples of social bookmarking sites include del.icio.us and digg.com.
Most social bookmark services are organized by users applying "tags" or keywords to content on a Web site. This means that other users can view bookmarks that are associated with a chosen tag, and see information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. In many cases, users can also comment or vote on bookmarked items.
Social bookmarking is also interchangeably sometimes referred to as folksonomy, collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. "Folksonomy" is a combination of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a taxonomy generated by a person or group of people.
So, there is great benefit to encouraging people to bookmark your Web site. The type of traffic you will receive will probably be very targeted and engaged in the content on your web site, so social bookmarking can be a great tool in your web site promotion strategy.
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.
