The Growth of Social Bookmarking

During the “dot com” boom back in the early nineties, a practice called social bookmarking came into being. These systems allowed users to store helpful or useful Internet information.

When these bookmarks are added to the system, they are made accessible to other users searching for the same type of information. The bookmarks can then be searched by topic, category, meta tags or simply at random.

With the launch of Itlist.com in 1996, social online bookmarks were born. Competition began to soar with the addition of sites like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks and Quiver. However, because these sites didn’t have a format laid out to be profit making, most went under as the infamous “dot com” bubble burst.

So what advantages does this have?

Simply, you can log in to these sites as a member, like on Myspace, and search the database of bookmarks. Now this sounds like a search engine, but has one real big difference. The results you get will be related to the subject of your search and will be places alreadey visited by other web surfers that found those links to be helpful. When you search with a search engine like Yahoo or Google, you can receive hundreds of thousands of web sites in the results. Some of these may not be exactly what you are looking for. This is all taken care of with social bookmarking sites.

This advantage has been the boon of social bookmarking recently and it has seen a comeback as a result. In these days of instantaneous gratification, social bookmarking sites are growing again. But this time, they are incorporating income generating programs and techniques. Seems a lesson was learned 10 years ago and this time around should be interesting.

This is good for the average surfer because the added income generation with ad placement and such will keep costs of membership down-possibly even free. Also as a benefit to met marketers, links to affiliate sites can be added under categories pertaining to that interest. This provides targeted leads that any marketer will tell you are extremely important. In this way, the system can also be viral. As more people bookmark the same sites, backlinks are created, thus intensifying search engine rankings for website owners savvy enough to use this as a marketing tool. This alone could cause a massive growth in the social bookmarking establishment.

Disadvantages are few but relatively minor. Most of these are associated with tags and include misspellings, synonym tags, keywords and their structure not being standardized among others. These are not going to stop you from finding what you need, though.

A few of the bigger social bookmarking sites are blue Dot, Chipmark, del.icio.us, Netscape, Netvouz and Stumbleupon. There is also social bookmarking software for webmasters to add this dimension to their websites.

The business, networking and backlinking uses of social bookmarking will have a profound effect upon  the growth of the social bookmarking of today. As more web owners and online business owners grab onto the reins, the possibilities remind one of MySpace and Facebook.