How Does Social Bookmarking Work?
The basic concept of Social Bookmarking Work Web 2.0 is that it is user-directed and social bookmarking
is a part of Web 2.0 so it is, of course, user directed. Social bookmarking is a
way of organizing and categorizing information with the use of ‘tags’.
Tags are based upon key words that identify the bookmark so this is a true
user-directed way that information is organized and categorized.
When a bookmarked site is clicked on, the social bookmarking site identifies
the person who created the bookmark and provides access to other sites that
the same user has bookmarked.
Now, the person who created the bookmark-Social Bookmarking Work and the tag is also provided
information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who
has clicked on it.
This system makes it very easy for like-minded people to make social
connections and to identify others who have the same interests, over time this
develops a community of users with mutual interests.
As a community of users develops, they sometimes develop a very unique set
of key words that define resources of common interest. These unique sets of
keywords have come to be referred to as ‘folksonomy’.
Wikipedia defines the term, folksonomy as: “Folksonomy is a neologism for a
practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More
colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to
organize information into categories.
In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only
arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to
multi-level teams.”
How will Social Bookmarking Impact the Web?
Actually, it is pretty clear right now that social bookmarking is having a huge
impact on the way that information is being classified, categorized, stored and
exchanged.
Social Bookmarking Work
It is possible to believe that in the future the impact will be even stronger. Web
1.0 was static but Web 2.0 is fluid. The face is ever changing.
The technology that social bookmarking is based upon is really rather
simple…there isn’t anything complex about it. It is user friendly. The level of
knowledge needed to gain huge benefits from social bookmarking is low.
People do not have to be computer gurus to make use of the technology at all.
The technology is so simple and the system is so easy to use that it will
continue to grow in popularity into the foreseeable future.
Because of this inevitable growth of social bookmarking and the easily used.
tagging of such things as multimedia files, it may well be just as inevitable that
the design and function of databases themselves will also change drastically to
be able to accommodate this new way of managing information.
How is Social Bookmarking Affecting Education?
Teaching and learning are the two components of education. The objective of
transferring information and knowledge from one person to another person or
a group of persons is being greatly affected by social bookmarking.
The exchange of information and the coming together of like-minded
individuals into loosely knitted online communities are both impacting
education as a whole.
For so many centuries education suffered from slow communication. Today the
internet itself has greatly speeded up communication and Social Bookmarking Work
has doubled that speed in the last few years.
Social bookmarking has created a method whereby bibliographies, papers, etc.
can be easily and quickly shared and accessed by multiple people at the same
time. These same resources can be altered or edited online.
Why is Social Bookmarking Important to Internet Marketing?
There are several ways in which social bookmarking is having an affect on
internet marketing. It would be hard to determine just which effect is having
the greatest impact.
The ability to create tags using key words which social bookmarking sites allow
is very attractive to internet marketers.
It didn’t take the internet marketing community long to figure out that these
backlinks that are created when the links are added to other favorites lists
cause search engine spiders to visit websites and that Page Rank can be
dramatically increased along with the number of visitors to a website. The
more visitors, means more sales of products and services.
Another asset that internet marketers quickly became aware of that social
bookmarking sites provide is that they are great research tools for example a
website owner might find that a ‘sailing’ tag is also associated with a ‘boat
repair’ tag. That information can open doors for business expansion.
Is There a Down Side to Social Bookmarking?
To every up-side there is always a down-side and social bookmarking is not an
exception to that rule.
The very fact that social bookmarking is user driven is one of the potential
down sides to it. Users are not professionals, users are just people and the
ability to use social bookmarking sites for fun as well as for profit does not
require a great deal of technical knowledge.
As a matter of fact, it requires almost no knowledge and because users are
‘amateurs’, key words used in tags are not consistent. The information is
sometimes scattered and key words that seem logical to amateurs don’t
necessarily lead to related topics.
Yet another potential down-side and one that is happening more frequently is
that users are abusing the system. Since it is a user driven system it is more
susceptible to abuse and misuse. There are spammers out there that are
bookmarking the same site multiple times.
The idea, of course, is that the more times the link appears the better the
search engine spiders like it and the more apt the link is to be clicked on and
the more apt it is that the site will be visited.
What is The Bottom Line of Social Bookmarking?
The bottom line is that social bookmarking is here and it is here to stay. People
are using social bookmarking sites to make social connections as well as to
form communities.
From the internet marketing point of view, Social Bookmarking Work is a tool that
can be used to increase search engine optimization, the number of website
visitors can ultimately increase sales but there is also the possibility of the
system being abused.
Like everything else…the more social bookmarking is abused, the less effective
it will become.
Internet marketers are learning that they can have a lot of fun by using sites
like MySpace and Facebook and other social bookmarking sites and make a lot
of money in the process. It’s what is known as a win/win situation and one that
internet marketers are catching onto very quickly to take advantage of.
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