What are social bookmarks?
Whilst personal bookmarks saved within a user's own Internet browser are only accessible by that user, social bookmarks can be viewed by all interested Internet users and are managed by an external service provider. Social bookmarking works differently to conventional search engines such as Google or Yahoo, with the actual relevance of Internet articles or websites to users being evaluated rather than a hit list produced on the basis of keywords. Social bookmarking thus offers an alternative to conventional search engines.
Advantages:
- Stored bookmarks can be accessed from any computer.
- Users can view the bookmarks of other users with similar interests to discover new content.
- Registration with all of the most popular social bookmarking sites is free.
How they work:
After registering with a social bookmarking site, users use that service to store the addresses of web pages they want to keep a note of or share with other users. As a rule, these bookmarks are publicly accessible to other users; however, users can limit their bookmarks to a certain user group or restrict them to private use only.
Users can store additional information with the saved bookmarks such as comments, ratings or links to related information.
Saving bookmarks in the public domain enables other users to search according to different criteria. Web pages are ranked according to the number of times a page has been bookmarked, i.e. the larger the number of bookmarks pointing to a page, the higher
