is a specific way that various online communities use to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet.
In a
social bookmarking system,
users save links to web pages that they want to remember. These bookmarks can be public, private or shared with only a specific group of users. You can view those bookmarks chronologically, sort them according to specific criteria or search by keywords. The information about the bookmark also usually includes the number of users who have bookmarked it. You can also import or export your bookmarks, comment them, rate, leave annotations and email them.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks so that subscribers could be aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
In order to be categorized and classified, bookmarks usually contain tags - keywords or terms, associated with this bookmark. Tagging system has become very popular since the traditional way of organizing files (using folders and subfolders) is not effective in this area. There still exist some social bookmarking sites using mixed system of folders and tags, but they are not very numerous.
It naturally happens that tags repeat, so bookmarking sites build the hierarchy and assign ratings to tags according to their popularity. The information about tag popularity and relationship between tags allows to sort tags and add them all to a tag cluster or tag cloud - a visual depiction of rating-sorted list of all tags of social site.
Higher rating leads to a larger traffic inflow and consequently gives higher Page Rank to the tag. The most interesting part of this process is that the initial bookmark that contained this tag also gets the same PR as the tag itself, and consequently the site featured in that bookmark also gets the PR increase. This technology of site promotion is known as tagging and it was first mentioned by Joshua Schachter, creator of Delicious in 2005 during his presentation entitled "Future of Tagging".
Tagging has become hugely widespread since that moment and is used pretty much everywhere in the world of SEO nowadays.
