How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

The basic concept of 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 user generated and 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 and the tag is also provided information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who 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 a community of users develops.

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.”