Social bookmarking enables internet users to share online information, photos and videos. Just like the bookmarks (sometimes referred to as 'favorites') you use on your internet browser they are basically links. It’s a way of sharing information, or at least directing others to it. The information itself isn’t there, but if you click on the social bookmark icon you will be led to it. It’s something that has become more common on the internet recently. More people are using it - for personal reasons and in business too.
Some social bookmarking services also allow users to vote on links, this system allows others to easily see which links are worth visiting and which ones are not.
The actual process of social bookmarking is easy. When you visit a site that uses social bookmarking, you will see one or more icons that point to social bookmark service sites. What you do then is simply click on the one you want to use; to add the bookmark to. You will then be presented with a log in page for that particular social bookmarking service. You log in with your username and password; then you’ll usually have the option to add a comment or caption to your link. Then simply click on ‘share’ or ‘done’ to complete the procedure.
There are a lot of social bookmarking services around the internet. Some are very well known and others less so. Some are solely for the purpose of social bookmarking; others are sites that use social bookmarking as one particular part of their service. An example of the latter is Facebook. This site is primarily a social networking site, but people can use it for social bookmarking too, by adding bookmarks (links) to their profile. Other people can then click on them and be directed to whatever the user is wanting to show.
Well known social bookmarking services include Digg It, Reddit and Stumble. These are services that work purely with social bookmarks. Other sites that use it as part of the bigger picture (like Facebook) are Twitter and Bebo. There are many more besides these, such as Delicious, Backflip and Diigo.
Quite often, when social bookmarking, you will find that there are only the icons to click on, rather than the name of the service, so you will need to learn these icons if you are going to be using social bookmarking in a big way. There are websites that list the different icons, telling you which site each one belongs to, so if you have a problem recognising an icon, you can easily find out which site it’s for. Alternatively you can just click on it, and see which social bookmarking service you are directed to. Some of the icons will be familiar to you already, like the white ‘f’ on a blue background for Facebook or the little blue ‘t’ for Twitter.
To add social bookmarking icons to your site that work with JavaScript and without, simply go to the homepage of Social Bookmarking Links and copy and paste the code onto your site.
Social Bookmarking Links | Social Bookmarking Buttons | What is Social Bookmarking?
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