Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves are not shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
In a social bookmarking system users store lists of Internet resources that they consider them as useful. They also categorize the resources with ’tags‘ or ‘labels‘ which are words given by the users associated with the resource. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for markers associated with certain ‘tags’ and classify in a ranking resources according to the number of users that have marked.
Nevertheless, we can find advantages and disadvantages related to this topic. On the one hand, some of the advantages are the following ones:
- Advantages over other traditional tools as search engines. The ranking of resources is done by humans instead of machines that process information automatically according to a programme.
- The most useful resources are marked by more users. In this sense, it creates a ranking of resources based on user criteria. It is a measure of the usefulness of resources.
On the other hand, these are the disadvantages:
- There is no pre-established system of keywords or categories.
- Users can create ‘tags’ too customized with little meaning for others.
In this way, the competition has made that services offer more than share bookmarks and allow votes, comments, import or export, add notes, send email links, automatic notification, rss, create groups and social networks.
Sources:
- Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Última modificación: 07-10-09. Fecha de consulta: 14-10-09 from http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcadores_sociales
- Swissinfo.ch from http://www.swissinfo.ch/spa/swissinfo.html?siteSect=46&sid=7991124
