You may be wondering just what exactly social bookmarking is all about. It's part of a relatively new phase of web sites, sometimes known as Web 2.0, that are mainly community-based where people can have their own page or section where they can store and classify their favorite links, which are tagged with relevant keywords. In this way they can be shared among as many people as can find them.

Social bookmarking lists can be freely available to the general public, or just to a specific network of sites. The list of links can be viewed in several ways: by tag, by category, or simply in random order. They can even be a privacy setting created on individual bookmarks.

Visitors to social bookmarking services can search for any bookmarks that have been assigned an association with a particular tag. The bookmark resources are often ranked according to the number of other visitors who have in turn bookmarked them.

Some of the more popular social bookmarking communities are to be found at sites like, www.folksonomy.org, del.icio.us, www.flickr.com, www.myspace.com, www.youtube.com, and technorati.com. Some of these sites have started with very little, and subsequently changed hands for millions of dollars once their social--and financial--importance has been recognized.

People who are new to the whole idea of social bookmarking often wonder how this system differs from, and is superior to, search engine classification. In certain aspects it may not be superior, though it all depends on how it is viewed by the individual. But social bookmarking requires human intervention to take place, while search engine ranking is done by computer software that depends on algorithms.

Humans creating tag-based classification of the resources they discover on the Internet have a clear understanding of what is contained within the resource, a web site, for example. Search engines using algorithms--albeit very clever algorithms--are still only unthinking, unfeeling machines instructed to do what they do.

End users of social bookmarked resources will arguably be better served in the long run than by search engine results, as they are finding a more useful resource, which has been classified by other users with similar needs and aspirations. When a social bookmark is ranked highly it is because other users considered it to be of greater use than other, broadly similar resources.

Social bookmarking sites have been dubbed Web 2.0, which might confuse some people. This does not mean that it is a new version of the Internet--that would be quite impossible. It simply describes certain web sites that use new technologies that, broadly speaking, are able to be utilized because of the availability and high uptake of fast broadband Internet connections that can be found in most countries today.

As with all things it seems, on the Internet, social bookmarking is susceptible to abuse. Because a web page has a greater chance of being found the more times it is tagged and bookmarked, spammers have often seized the opportunity to make multiple bookmarks of a single web page using many popular tags. This has the effect of appearing to make that page a popular one. This, of course, in turn forces the developers of social bookmarking sites to counter the spammers actions by introducing greater security measures.

As a general rule, Social Bookmarking is a trend that can be valuable for a small business owner to explore – and leverage – within your small business marketing efforts.