Social Bookmarking Utility And Usability

Social bookmarking is a internet based utility where user register to share their bookmarks which will be displayed and viewed by other people on the web. The bookmarking sites uses tags to arrange the contents and user can access the information by analyzing or identifying the tag name for a particular website. This method was first come into existence in 1996 and was lost its popularity for years then. Once again, during 2003, social bookmarking become popular when online marketers find it useful in promoting online businesses for more visibility and exposure.

How social bookmarking works:
When a user finds something interesting content or resource on a website, he/she stores it in the form list by tagging it into categories. In this way, other people can find the information and resources by searching it using tags, categories or words related to the content or information. For others to access the information, the content should be shared otherwise such content will only be accessible to the person who have bookmarked it.

Most of the resources on social bookmarking sites are listed using tags and are ranked on the basis of the time that particular resource have been searched or bookmarked by the users. Some other social bookmarking sites uses some kind of system to analyze and rank resources according to words, keywords or systematic algorithm to give importance to a particular resource after doing some study on the system to help people search the content easily.

A major advantage of social bookmarking is that all resources are listed and shared by human using tags and categories. There is no software involved in this techniques. One disadvantage of social bookmarking is that there is no standard for defining tags or categories which may come out with a confusing situation when we search for a resource with a relevant phrase and a list of unwanted things are shown.