The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList. But what is social bookmarking? Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as “a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources”: that is, the practice of classifying resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. These services allow the user not only to collect his favourite resources online, but they also give the option to keep them. What’s more, each user can consult the collection of other users and they can also add them to their own selection. As a result, resources can be shared among different people and they can be easily distributed. What happens is that if you are searching for a particular subject, other users may have bookmarks that match up with exactly what you were looking for or interests you. This is due to the fact that you can see the collective list of resources from all the users who share the same research interest. In this kind of services, bookmarks that reference the resources are shared, but not the resources themselves.
Each user has the option to add a description to the bookmark, or votes in favour or against, or even tags (which become a folksonomy). That way, other users are able to know what the resource is about instead of having to download it for understanding the content.
* http://denham.typepad.com/km/2005/01/social_bookmark.html
* http://eibar.org/blogak/prospektiba/es/archive/2005/02/20/178
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
* http://dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
