Social Bookmarking and its Advantages

Social bookmarking is the best way for users to search, store, classify and share their Internet bookmarks. Interent savvy users generally store lists or urls of their useful internet resources on a social bookmarking system or network which can be accessible to all the users of that social network or website. It is the best way for users with similar interests can find the useful links by topic, category or tags. The social bookmarking network or system is the fastest and safest way of storing information from your web browser. Some other services specialized to a specific subject or format - xml or rss feeds, images, books, videos, shopping items, map locations, etc.

The social bookmarking system has some advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, i.e. search engine spiders or bots. All tag-based classification of Internet resources mainly done by human, who can only understand the content of the resource, whereas the automated software algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource which provides semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. As people bookmark resources which they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. 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.

The classification and ranking of the web resources is a continuous process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to web feeds based on tags, collection of tag terms which allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

List of some renowned social bookmarking sites:
Bloglines
Blue Dot
Chipmark
del.icio.us
Digg
Diigo
Furl
GiveALink.org
Ma.gnolia
My Web
Netvouz
Netscape
Newsvine
Reddit
Simpy
SiteBar
StumbleUpon