Social bookmarking
Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves.
Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy.
Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
[6] Another system known as WebTagger, developed by a team at the Computational Sciences Division at NASA, was presented at the Sixth International WWW Conference held in Santa Clara on April 7–11, 1997.
[7] Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market.
[13] Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst—Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century".
Digg was founded in 2004[21] with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed by competitors Reddit in 2005[22] and Newsvine in 2006.
[23] As of January 20, 2016, Reddit is now the 32nd highest ranking in the world and Digg is no longer a social bookmarking platform and has dropped out of the top 1000.
[25] While such vocabularies suffer from some of the informality problems described below, they can be seen as emerging from the decentralized actions of many users, as a form of crowdsourcing.
Institutions, including businesses, libraries, and universities have used social bookmarking as a way to increase information sharing among members.
Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.
[32] RISAL (Repository of Intean organization's users to manage and share bookmarks on the web and supporting teaching and learning at the university level.
[33] Social bookmarking tools have several purposes in an academic setting including: organizing and categorizing web pages for efficient retrieval; keeping tagged pages accessible from any networked computer; sharing needed or desired resources with other users; accessing tagged pages with RSS feeds, cell phones and PDAs for increased mobilan organization's users to tag, manage and share bookmarks on the web and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries.
XtLearn.net[35] allows bookmarking of both in one step,[36] the relevant URL being delivered to either tutors or learners, depending on the delivery context.
