Social Bookmarking - The New Way To Find Useful Information On The Internet?

Before the Internet, if you wanted to socialize, you would join a club or a social circle. Maybe you would join a book club or recipe exchange club. You would maybe join a dating network, you would be able to find a group that shared your same interests and share each others insights and thoughts and discoveries.

Well, that is basically what social bookmarking is. It is a way to connect with other people who share the same interests and you can share it on the web. The most popular method that seems to work for everyone involved is to find these links of your interests, networks and groups through social bookmarking. The way it is done allows others to search the bookmarks that you have saved.

Once you get set up on a social bookmarking network, you can store all your favorites and Internet resources that are relevant to your likes and interests. Your bookmarks will be compiled into a list that can be accessed by others that share your same interests. When you save a website you like on your bookmark, you will add a "Tag" which puts it in a category. Lets say you love art and found a great site with some of your favorite artists paintings. You will save it and make a "tag" with the words; art, paintings, artist name. Then this will put it out there for someone who may be looking up that particular artists on that social network. They will come across your bookmarks and see what you like, then they can save that same site in their bookmarks. You may want to find a group that loves to read and join their book of the month or something like that. You will do that by putting in the words that would be on their tags. Lets say you will search in "Simpy", (I will get to that in a moment) "reading group". You will be able to find everyone that has that tag in their bookmarks and can become a part of their group. You have made instant friends.

Social bookmarking actually began in April 1996. This was the launch of a social directory called itList.com. From that point it started to grow and become popular, so much that it became very competitive for the bigger companies moving in like Backflip and Blink. There were so many getting into it, only to find out that it was not really great for making money for these firms. Then there was the big bubble of the dot-com that burst causing a lot of these firms to fail.

In 2005 and 2006, del.icio.us, and Simpy, and Furl became the new social bookmarking sites and became very popular in what seemed overnight. These are still some of the most popular social bookmarking sites out there. After that Diigo, Netvouz and Stumbleupon entered the picture and became the markets second wave. There are more now like Newsvine, Netscape, BEENclicked, Conbuzz and so many more than can be named in this short article. Even IBM has entered into the social bookmarking frenzy as well as the BBC web site.

So, go set up a bookmarking account for yourself and have some fun.

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