Social Bookmarking
The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList, the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market. They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy).
Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
In a social Bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation and groups or other social network features.
Many educators use Bookmarks or Favorites in their personal browsers to save Web sites they use frequently in class or at home. But, what if you've saved a site on your home computer and want to find that Web site while you're at school? Or say you want to share your bookmarked sites on Edgar Allen Poe with other teachers? The typical bookmark/favorite system doesn't work for these scenarios. Also, because you can put these bookmarked sites into folders that you label with a name like "Osmosis sites" or "Civil War Documents," there is some minimal organization, but it's fairly limited. For example, if a site has both an interactive tool on alliteration and good biographical material on Langston Hughes, do you put it your Langston Hughes folder or your Alliteration folder -- or do you put it in two folders and save it twice? What if there are not just two savable aspects of that site, but also five or ten great things on very different topics? How many times do you bookmark the site and how many folders do you create? The answer to that question is to consider using social Bookmarking. That technique uses a Web-based service instead of your browser to save and organize bookmarks. Instead of individually saving the site in a variety of folders, you just type a few keywords called tags (Langston Hughes, alliteration, Black History, metaphor, rubric, and so on.), and your sites are organized automatically with sites saved by other users, using those same keywords. You even can see a list of your saved bookmarks, not just by alphabetical order, but also by how often you use a given tag. So, you know at a glance that you already have a lot of information on World War II, but not nearly as much on the Spanish-American War. Thus you benefit from the research of others, while having a far more dynamic and helpful system of organization.
