What are social bookmarks?
Social Bookmarking sites allow you to store, tag and share links
with anyone across the internet. This enables you to store,
organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet
with the help of metadata. In a bookmarking system, users save
links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These
bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared
only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain
networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The
allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by
category or via a search engine.
Many social bookmarking services also provide web feeds for
their lists of bookmarks, including lists organised by tags. This
allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are
saved, shared, and tagged by other users. You can also do things
such as rate and comment on bookmarks, import and export bookmarks
from browsers and email them.
You will see these bookmark icons on lots of news orientated
websites such as the BBC. The main bookmark sites are Digg, del.icio.us, reddit and StumbleUpon.