What Are Bookmark Sites In Social Media?
Bookmark sites also known as social bookmarking sites are a popular device for sharing and storing bookmarks with others. Everyone has a favorite set of sites, and almost everyone has a set of bookmarks for frequently used or enjoyed sites. Bookmark sites enable the average surfer to share their favorites with others along with comments on what they found interesting on the site or what they disliked.
This is just one facet of web 2.0 but social media where regular internet users share their thoughts has become wildly popular and many sites have popped up to serve this function. In the beginning, that is before web 2.0, the average internet user was faceless and mostly voiceless unless it was in a chat room. The internet was a place to find information, read, or sometimes watch videos, but rarely were the surfers allowed to interact in a meaningful way or to influence what was shown on any one site. Social media has changed that and now surfers have a voice and can influence what is seen and share what they felt was funny, sad, awful or informative.
There are a wide variety of social bookmarking sites to choose from but all of them work in a similar manner. You must sign up for an account with the chosen bookmarking site (remember this is social media and the surfer is no longer faceless or voiceless). You will have a screenname on that site and a list of favorite sites can be created. When you find something great on a website you can add it to your list of bookmarks along with comments, and even tags.
Some of the more common and well established social bookmarking sites are; Twitter, where you don’t bookmark you tweet and share your newfound web discovery and your thoughts on it too. Digg, is a very popular social bookmarking site and website owners take great pride in how many “digs” they have had. Stumbleupon allows users to give thumbs up to bookmarks and boasts some 9 million stumblers. Delicious is a venerable social bookmarking site and even offers a toolbar that will let you share a bookmark without leaving the page and going to their site. Facebook has it’s own social bookmarking feature as well and you can post your favorite bookmark to your Facebook page as well as any thoughts you have on it.
Social media and social bookmarking have evolved rapidly from an experiment into the new face of the internet where surfers influence the popularity of a site and finally have a voice. Website owners and especially blog owners recognize the importance of this and many have widgets beneath posts or articles so that surfers can bookmark a post or article with ease.
Along with the very real positive influence that social bookmark sites have had on the internet they are also subject to spammers. Site owners figured out quickly that the more often they were bookmarked by surfers, the more popular they became with Google. This forced the social bookmark site developers to keep developing means to prevent such manipulation.
For surfers sites bookmarked by them are not private but intended to be shared and can’t normally be hidden, but hiding them would negate the reason for putting them on a social site anyway. Most sites encourage bookmarkers to use tags to identify their bookmarks and organize them with others.
RSS feeds are even available for some social bookmark sites and can be followed by tags, comments, keywords or even by username. The addition of social media to the web has changed the face of the internet and though it is subject to some manipulation, web 2.0 has brought more interaction and given the average user a voice, and it’s not going away.
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