The Social Bookmarking Phenomenon
Author: Madison Lockwood

Some days, it seems that we are quickly evolving from a digital
world where information was THE marketable commodity to a
communications market, where new methods of communicating,
networking and socializing are being introduced on a rapid fire
basis and are the new consumers of online attention and time.
Blogs, wikis, RSS newsfeeds, podcasts, video socialization
built around applications like YouTube...all of these are
recently formulated methods of communication that seemingly
overnight have developed millions of participants.

One of the networking methodologies that has evolved from
Internet architecture is the phenomenon of "social
bookmarking." One of the more popular sites is del.icio.us. On
this site the notion is that you, the web surfer, share
interests with others who have web access via your bookmarked
URLs. It's the same concept as bookmarking favorites with your
browser, but the collection of favorites has a coding system
and is shared with others. You build a library of URLs that
reflect your interests and that you consider worth visiting.
You add a personal "tag" with a keyword that characterizes the
site.

You can "subscribe" to tags so that you see every new post with
that tag. That in turn can take you to the poster's entire list
of favorites which may prove to be a new trove of information
for you. del.icio.us allows you to go through the same exercise
with podcasts, which are now scattered across the Internet
galaxy like asteroids.

Others on the web have access to your library and thus to your
personal interests. Utilizing a web based application (in this
case, del.icio.us) participants are able to search through
sites that others have bookmarked, using not only a standard
search term but the tag that has been used to characterize the
site. Tags form a collective body of URLs and thus, a body of
knowledge - and collective access to those tags forms a
community of people with common interests. Included in the
process is an optional personal profile, which provides your
email address and allow others to communicate with you
personally.

One of the drawbacks to this format is that a tag search is
going to get you every commercial website out there who has
laid claim to the same keyword. It takes a lot of scanning and
scrolling to find sites that have been tagged by individuals
instead of search engines.

There are several platforms out there for social networking.
Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a site that uses uploaded photos for
networking purposes instead of URLs. www.43places.com is a site
where you upload your travel experiences, travel photos and
travel interests along with your profile. Wists (www.wists.com)
is a "social shopping" exchange where the bookmarks are all
about commercial shopping sites. The level of personal
communication allowed by social networking sites is up to you:
on 43 Places you can post your photo but refuse personal email.
You can also hold the line at public access to your favorites
library on del.icio.us.

Other social bookmarking platforms (or tools) as they are
called, include:

- Backflip
- Blinklist
- blogmarks
- Connotea
- de.lirio.us
- feedmarker
- Jots
- Lookmarks
- Scuttle
- unalog
- Spurl
- Simpy
- Wists
- Yahoo! My Web 2.0

They all have an assortment of tricks and widgets that make
their sites a little different. Some of them have fairly
sophisticated search methods for their subscribed users; some
allow you to "bundle" tags for search purposes; most provide
lists of the most popular bookmarks and the recent posts. It's
all an interesting experiment in 'distance sharing'. Making use
of it for professional (research) or personal uses simply
requires taking the time to become comfortable with the
methodology and then learning how to get maximum usage out of
the tagging system.


About The Author: Madison Lockwood is a customer relations
associate for http://www.apollohosting.com. She helps clients
understand how a website may benefit them both personally and
professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting,
ecommerce hosting, & VPS hosting to a wide range of customers.