6 main characteristics of Social Bookmarking sites

How many website addresses can you remember? 10, 100, 1000? You will be classified a web junkie if you can remember more than ten web addresses. So, how do you access your favourite websites? You don’t have to tell me the answer. You bookmark the websites that you like.

Once you do so, you don’t have to worry – as long as you are using the same laptop or desktop. The day you change your laptop or try to access your favourite websites from another laptop you are lost. You have to create fresh bookmarks.

This is where social bookmarking sites make your life easier. You can use them to save your bookmarks online. Once you do so, you don’t have to worry. You can access your bookmarks from any part of the world, and from any computer.

There are dozens of social bookmarking sites that have set up shop on the net. But the five that are most popular are: Delicious.com, Stumble.com, Reditt.com, Digg.com and Pinterest.com.

Social bookmarking sites have six key characteristics. These are:

# 1. They provide free server space
The social bookmarking sites provide you free server space to store your bookmarks. This space is literally unlimited. You can store as many bookmarks as you want.

#2. They give you a Web address
You are assigned a unique web address, which you can share with your friends and business associates. For instance, the Pinterest board of Easy Media can be accessed at: http://www.pinterest.com/sunilsa/easy-media. This is a valuable facility to have. You can print this web address on your visiting card, and your customers can find you on the net.

#3. They allow bookmarks to be rated
The social bookmarking sites allow your friends to rate the utility of a web page or website. This becomes a useful yardstick for new visitors. They can decide to click on a website based on the popular votes that it has been given.

# 4. They allow sharing of bookmarks
A great feature of social bookmarking sites is that they allow members to share bookmarks. For instance, I can share a bookmark on a social bookmarking site with you if you too are a member of that site.

# 5. They display the most popular bookmarked pages
The social bookmarking sites like delicious.com or stumble.com serve pages bookmarked by members with interests similar to yours. This is more like a social recommendation made by hundreds of people.

# 6. They allow tagging of web pages
You can attach tags to each page that you bookmark. This makes search easier. For instance, a member searching for pages with the Social Media tag can enter the term “Social media” in the search box. The social bookmarking site will serve all pages that have been tagged Social Media by members. This search is better than the search pages generated by a search engine because here the pages have been tagged by humans.