Some Important things you should know about Social Book Marking.

1. What is it?
Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and select individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

2. How it works?
Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a book-mark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed,“professional” method of classifying information. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provided access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many
people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned by that tag. In this way, the community of users over a period of time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources.

3. Why it is significant?
Social bookmarking gives users the opportunity to express different perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures. This process allows like-minded individuals to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of common tags for resources. By doing this it lets you take advantage of the insights of other users to find information related to the topic you are researching, even in areas that aren’t obviously connected to the primary topic. If you are looking for information about diamonds, for example, you might find that other users saw a connection between diamonds and jewelry, taking you in new, potentially valuable directions. It’s easy to imagine assigning a value for individual resources, resulting in a ranking system that functions as a common filter.