Chapter 45
Social Bookmarking
What is social bookmarking?
You might recognize website names such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon—or maybe not! Either way, these platforms are playing an important role in the social media explosion revolutionizing today's Internet. Here's how they work. We're all familiar with “favorites.” When you visit a website you like, you can bookmark it to your favorites, allowing you to quickly find the site again in the future. But what happens when you're using someone else's computer? You don't have access to your favorites anymore because they're on your computer, not the computer you're using.
Social bookmarking platforms are websites where you can create an account for yourself and then bookmark your favorites to that account rather than creating a bookmark on your computer. That means you'd have access to your favorites from any computer in the world. That's pretty neat, but it's a fairly basic piece of functionality. But wait! There's more.
The cool thing is that the social bookmarking platforms aggregate all the bookmarking activity of their users. What a wealth of information: Some of these platforms have more than 20 million users! That means you could go to Digg and search for tags such as “sports” or “news” and find the most bookmarked websites in the world about those topics. These results are found not through some complicated search engine algorithm, but according to your peer group. You could also search for “fly fishing in ...
