Social bookmarking has become extremely popular and is a very useful information sorting and searching mechanism in today's Web 2.0 page.
It has a benefit in the sense that the users who are searching for and discovering information are then bookmarking and adding as favorites that information because it is useful. Therefore if it is useful to one person, it is more than likely relevant to an entire group of people.
This counteracts the search engine problem of relevancy, where a search engine can be fooled into thinking a document is relevant, but a human being cannot.
The process is that a user finds a site that is of use to them in the present and could be in the future, and is then bookmarked in their favorites list. Before social bookmarking, this is where it ended. But in this case, that bookmark is then submitted to a directory which holds collections of bookmarks.
That bookmark is then tagged with a series of words or phrases that roughly describes the content, the context and any related subjects by the user. The bookmark is then made publicly available so that other users can search against the tags and find information that is useful and relevant, because a human being has validated it.
On top of this, other users can then update the tags, effectively fine tuning the search fields that the search engine will search against. In this way, the social bookmarking mechanism works in the same way as a wiki, as the users themselves update and maintain the tags that accompany a bookmark. Over time, useless and irrelevant information will be weeded out from the tags, therefore making future searches more efficient and even more relevant.
This system of social bookmarking and classification is known as "folksonomy", which is a word formed out of conjoining the words "taxonomy" and "folk". Taxonomy is a process of hierarchical and metric-based scientific classification. Crossing this word with the idea of folk, i.e. groups of people, leads us to the word folksonomy.
While this is a very useful community-based system, there are some downfalls to folksonomy and social bookmarking in general.
Because it is a social and group managed system, the system has no definitive and official vocabulary for its tagging mechanism. Effectively, the tags are dictated by the users community, so therefore what one person means by the use of one word could be completely different to another person. This ambiguity can sometimes cause difficulty in the actual searches themselves.
Also, because it is a collective and collaborative version of taxonomy, hierarchical relationships can be difficult to define. A person may be able to a bookmark with the word "diamond" and "gemstone", but will not be able to indicate that gemstone is a parent class of diamond. Yet, social bookmarking, due to the very same interaction of users that can potentially cause confusion in the tagging, exhibits the dynamics of a self organizing system. This means that, over time, a common trend appears in how a tag is defined for subjects with specific words.
Another downfall is the continual battle on the Internet with spam. Some spam distributors will bookmark a site for the distribution of spam using popular and upwardly trending tagging keywords, in an attempt to promote the site in line with any frequently searched for topics. However, the majority of social bookmarking system operators work hard to continuously update their security and validation systems to ensure that spammers do not interfere with the sites main purpose.
Social Bookmarking - The Benefits and Pitfalls of "Folksonomy" Check For The New Release in Health, Fitness & Dieting Category of Books NOW!
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Which ever way you look at it, social bookmarking is here to stay. It has its downfalls and it's problems, yet it is highly useful in finding both validated and relevant information. This is something that search engine algorithms are continually tweaked and modified for, because they have a problem with it. For instance, there are several projects right now that involve search engines where every page is validated by a human being, the Open Directory Project being one of them. Yet, this is nearly identical to the same mechanism that social bookmarking follows!
If you are a creator of legitimate Internet resources and want to look into social bookmarking as a way to promote your site, social bookmarking may well be a very useful tool for you. Unfortunately, it can take a lot of time given all the various social bookmarking sites that exist on the Internet.
Consider looking into time-saving tools like this one [http://bookmarkingdemon.net/bookmarking-demon/], which will allow you to automate the process of submitting your social bookmarks to a multitude of sites.
When you're ready to read more about the subject come and visit us at [http://www.bookmarkingdemon.net]
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