Social bookmarking is a form of collaborative software that allows you to save your bookmarks online instead of saving them in your own browser.

Here's how it works: Normally, when you find a site that you find interesting and you would like to visit again, you store them in your favorites. 

You do the same in social bookmarking, except that instead of bookmarking the site in your desktop, you bookmark and "tag" with keywords the site in online sites. Why is it called bookmarking? Because your bookmarks can be viewed by others.

Social bookmarking is becoming increasingly popular because people can access their favorites not just from their own computer but from anywhere with an Internet access. Also, bookmarked sites have been reviewed by humans so when you click on a tag, you have a higher probability of finding higher quality content.

Social bookmarking is a good way to find sites that are favored by other users who share the same interest as you. It also allows users to find other sites that you probably would not be found through the search engines.

Industry experts are already predicting that bookmarking will increasingly be the way savvy users will find information from the Internet because of its ability to deliver more relevant and higher quality content.

As a marketer, this is a way to expose your site to people who would be interested in your site but otherwise would not have found you through the other methods that you employ.

Tags or tagging is the way users assign locators to their bookmarks.  They are like keywords that help you remember the content of the site that you bookmarked. Most sites do not limit the number of bookmarks that you assign.  Web insiders refer to this act of assigning your own keywords and the resulting collaboration as folksonomy.

Here's how tagging works: Let's say  you have a site on exercise. You can tag it as "exercise", "yoga", "aerobics", or whatever term that will help you remember this site.  When someone else posts related content using the same tags, you start building or joining a collaborative repository of relevant information. Users normally view the most popular tags to see what others consider as important sites.

Social bookmarking is another one of those phenomenon that people are using increasingly. So it is bound to be more popular, both from the users' and marketer's point of view. 

Social bookmarking sites are also evolving.  There are a number of sites competing in this area but the the two most popular sites are del.icio.us and stumble upon.

As a result of this stiff competition, sites are now offering more than just bookmark sharing. Some sites include features such as rating, commenting. email links, feeds, automatic notification, annotation and the ability to create groups.

Each site has its own features.  Take a look at each of these sites and see which one would appeal to you:

All the sites listed above are active as of writing. Please notify us if any of the above links are not working.

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