Social Bookmarking
Here's a term you should know: social bookmarking. What is it? Why should you care?
As you already know there are literally hundreds of websites in the world. Or is that hundreds-of-billions? Anyways, there are a lot of them and so of course, it follows that there are a lot of companies out there trying to come up with cool technologies that can better sort this mess so you get only what’s good and relevant? I won’t talk about any of the things that have failed (mostly because they disapeared before I learned about them) but I will tell you about one technology that has succeeded in making the Internet more relevant, and succeeded huge.
It’s called social bookmarking and it’s more of an idea than a technology. The idea is that if you can get thousands of people to share their favourite bookmarked sites which you you rank sites based on number of other people who have also bookmarked those sites, then you would get a pretty good idea of what’s good. If you throw in a nice search tool and a system for allowing users to track bookmarks of specific people with similar interest, you’ll get a pretty cool tool.
Two of the most popular social bookmarking tools out right now are del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia but you can also find specific bookmarking services dedicated to specific kinds of sites (Technorati.com focusses on blogs). Take a look at the right column of this page, near the bottom and you’ll see some of the sites that we think our cool. We got all of these links from someone else. But of course, that’s the way information has always spread: we tell each other. I guess you could say that what’s really happened is that word-of-mouth has just got a lot more organized.
