The concept for social bookmarking began in 1996 when lists of bookmarks were made available online starting the launch of a site called itList. The site provided a directory of subcategories for browsing blog posts and online articles by topic matter or theme. Social bookmarking is the equivalent of going to a specific section in a library and researching topic of interest.
How They Work
Social bookmarking sites organize key content sources into groups by theme or category. There are more than thirty categories available to peruse on itList, which include Corporate, Healthcare, Careers and Advertising to name a few. The articles are organized into the subcategories by referring to the Meta tag on each article as criterion. This process is also referred to as “collaborative tagging” or folksonomy. One modern day example of folksonomy in action is “tag clouds” on blogs which seek to activate and attract social bookmarking.
Popular Bookmarking Sites
Since 1996 the number of social bookmarking sites has increased dramatically. Some of the more popular websites include AddThis and ShareThis to name a few. The number one social bookmarking site in the world is Twitter which remains non-monetized for the present time. However Twitter has announced that it will be monetizing the social bookmarking site shortly, although the extent to which that action might affect its current user population is not yet known.
