Social bookmarking lets users store content from blogs and other sources to their own lists of boomarks; many tools have been created to make this process easier, but all of them have basically the same algorithms. This allows each of these lists to be available for users to access at any time from any computer linked to the internet.

For example if you are collecting articles on online business tips you would bookmark all the articles that you find through your search and then access them through your web account. You could even categorize them or rank them once you’ve had the opportunity to go through the articles.

For bloggers social bookmarking is an important factor that contributes to website traffic. Bloggers can provide icon short cuts to add each of their articles to the visitors bookmark list and people with similar interests can now access the article through that bookmark network. This can drive more traffic to the blogger’s website and contribute to increased popularity.

Once collected, information may be bookmarked or tagged to allowed keyword searches through these article by all interested users. Tags are words that help to describe or to summarize the content of the referenced article.

Social bookmarking is a useful innovation allowing the quick and efficient collection of a wide variety of information on a given subject. More sites are beginning to use this concept, while making it more helpful and user-friendly. Social bookmarking tools now include many useful features such as public ratings, subscriptions, groups relating to particular topics, and many more.

This type of content collection tool is just starting to be produced and I’m sure we’ll eventually all be using some product of this kind, since we’re all looking for and gathering online content. It makes sense that tools like this would be coming out to give the user more flexibility and control, since our online activities depend on this so much.

The ability to make bookmarks available online, not dependent on any single machine or location, is in and of itself a major advance in internet technology; I am anxious to see how further advances in technology will improve the internet experience for users.

- Clark Maze