Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarks are similar to your browser bookmarks or favorites, with the added convenience of being saved on the Web instead of on your computer.
The public benefit of social bookmarking is that the Internet become organized and categorized by real people, instead of Google's robots.
A large number of social bookmarking sites have appeared on the web. You may have recognized some of the following names: Del.ic.ous, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Digg, Spurl, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo My Web. Or , you might have seen some of the symbols of the following social bookmarking sites: 
.
Many sites, like this one (see the bottom of this page) offer direct access to a number of social bookmarking sites. Or, you can download a browser add on that allows you to access your social bookmarks from any site.
You have the option to keep your bookmarks private or make them public. When you make some or all of your bookmarks public, you help to categorize and organize the web for all us.
The Democratic Republic of the Web
A social bookmark is vote for a Web site. A social bookmark helps others find relevant, high quality web sites.
Are you looking for a recommended mountain climbing site, the best php programming site, or the best security software, search a social bookmarking site, and you will find great sites that the search engines have missed.
Web sites organized by real people almost always produce better quality and more relevant results than any search engine can offer. Yet search engine offer a much broader array of sites. While you may not use social bookmarking sites for search, they offer a great secondary source to try when the search engines just don't give you what you are looking for.
Other Reasons to Social Bookmark
A social bookmark travels well. While browser bookmarks are stored only on your home computer or laptop, your social bookmarks are accessible from anywhere as long as you have access to the Internet. They are portable, lightweight, and protected behind a username and password.
Access to your browser bookmarks or favorites has always been problematic in that you have to synchronize them with software, or paid services.
It's likely that the number of social bookmaking services will make you confused. There are so many of them, that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. Aside from the ones listed on this page, there are dozens and dozens of other, smaller and less well known sites. You can use any social bookmarking site to store and categorize your own bookmarks. All of them act pretty much like the others.
But when it comes to searching for information that you might be looking for, some sites will give you better results than others.
A little know fact is that that more blog searches are conducted on Technorati than on Google. In a sense, social bookmarking sites have grown up. So, much so that search engines calculate into their relevancy scores the number of social bookmarks a particular site has.
Some topics that social bookmarking sites are best known for goes a bit like this
- Technorati: Blog Search
- Del.ic.ious: Websites
- Digg: News
- Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Stumble Upon: General, all purpose
