In simple term, social bookmarking is bookmarking sharing. Of course, the other benefit is its use of tagging (a form of metadata) to make bookmark search much easier and faster. It is also called social tagging due to the fact that the bookmarks are available to others through the use of tags as well. Another name for social tagging is folksonomy which means sharing or collaboration of tags or index by the people (creators or consumers) not the experts.

It is actually not a new concept. It started as early as 1996 with online bookmarking service that included public and private bookmarks. There were many online bookmark services that emerged later on based on similar concept with various other added features. It was not until 2003 that del.icio.us (now known as Delicious) was started that it pioneered the use of tagging and coined the term social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is linked to web 2.0 optimization. It is a powerful tool used in promoting a website by getting the community involvement. The concept is powerful as it is a comprehensive way that gets community involved in making the website popular. This is achieved by bookmarking the site with various social bookmarking services and getting backlinks. As a result, the traffic is increased and the search engines will index the site more quickly.

Here is the list of 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites according to eBizMBA. Heading the list is digg followed by Yahoo! Buzz, Technorati, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us.

There are also tools available that help people submit their site to multiple social bookmarking sites. The convenient tools help bloggers by submitting the site with a simple one-click. The most popular ones are SocialMarking, Socialmatic and SocialMarker.

I hope this article has covered enough introduction on Social Bookmarking. If you like this article, I hope you can bookmark it by clicking on bookmark by SocialMarker.

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