Social tags

Tags enable you to keep your bookmarks online and to share them with others.

The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today’s rich and social web ecosystem. (Read/Write Web)

Two services own the social bookmarking market, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I love them both. del.icio.us enables me to look at what other people are looking at, an enormously powerful tool for discovery.

StumbleUpon is more of a discovery system that learns what I like. I just went to grab the URL, and StumbleUpon recommended Mr. Picasso Head, which I absolutely love. Keeping the StumbleUpon toolbar on while you peruse websites enables you to give any site you visit thumbs up or thumbs down; good stuff rises to the top thanks to the wisdom of crowds.

To understand the buzz around Web 2.0, you must understand social tagging. Go to del.icio.us and also try out StumbleUpon.

More about social tags:

Social bookmarking (Wikipedia)

Functional Overview

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. These 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.

It’s increasingly 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.

List of social software (Wikipedia)
Social networking websites (Wikipedia)

Social networks (Wikipedia)

Collaborative bookmarking (Wikipedia) is a varient of social bookmarking for businesses and other large organizations.

Collaborative bookmarking provides a simple way for users to group bookmarks together and then share these grouped links with colleagues. The groups of links saved by a person can be retrieved by another employee through many different routes. A related group can also be delivered to another user at the point of need, e.g. when they are looking for related information. Since the software supplements a user’s browsing experience, and is ever-present and always available, it receives much greater utility than other knowledge-management systems.

In addition, some Collaborative Bookmarking systems can integrate with an existing search system by passing search terms to the system. This can provide another set of results for consideration by the system, or directly to the user.