What is social bookmarking

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Introduction:
On a social bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.

Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found.

Functional Overview:
In a social bookmarking system, users store links to web pages that they find useful. These link lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

Some search engines will only crawl websites that have been listed on social bookmark sites.