Last updated on April 9th, 2024 at 08:00 pm
Social bookmarking empowers online readers to easily find specific information that they want to acquire. In a nutshell, it is a more sophisticated version of a search engine. While search engines basically churn out results from the entire universe of web pages, social bookmarking websites provide results that have been screened and usually rated by the very people who once searched for the information that a user is currently searching.
These bookmarking websites are hubs that build groups of users who have the same area of interests. So for example, if you offer web site design services then you might want to join the groups of web design, small business, and marketing etc. Since these sites provide lists of recently added content and the most popular pages for the past 24 hours, week, or month, users can stay updated about news and bits of data regarding their chosen area, whether it be politics, entertainment, lifestyle, sports, fashion, science, among others.
To cite an example, let’s consider ourselves as fashion designers who want to know the news regarding the recently concluded fashion week. We go to our social bookmarking site, click the fashion section, search for “fashion week”, and are given three links. One link has 50 votes, the other 20, and the last 5. Based on the votes provided by fellow social bookmarkers, we can easily assume that the link with the most number of votes is the most relevant, the one that we’re supposed to click and read.
Compare such case with using our favorite search engine. We type in “fashion week,” and then eventually flooded with thousands of pages that discuss fashion week. The top link is an encyclopedia entry, the second a clothing store, the third, a shopping website, and so on. Before we reach the specific pages that we want to read, we already have wasted time clicking on irrelevant and useless links, as if looking for a needle in a huge pile of trash.
