Social bookmarking is a great way for all Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of their favourite web pages popular or obscure, educational or funny,it’s up to the individual entirely.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links of their personal favourite websites or specific pages and normally others can viewthem and vote for the most intresting or note worthy.
You can often choose to have your favourite bookmarks private, public a combination of both, and even with a group of friends.
to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. The allowed people/ friend/ group can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine/ or a prsonal account RSS feed, or even randomly on the main page of the site in order of votes eg: see www.bookmarkdevil.com.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags, some social bookmarking sites also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks or catogorize them for ease of searching by surfers.

The idea of shared online bookmarks dates back to April ‘96 with the launch of itList.com, followed fast by companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, many dissapear quite quickly in the social bookmark areana when they realise- it’s not really very profitable!
Del.icio.us pioneered tagging and soon to be followed by Furl, Stumbleupon, Netvouz, Ma.gnolia and Diigo.
Sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine are a related type of web service that provides a system for social news, tagging and bookmarking also.s

This social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource classification systems, such as search engines. All tag-based and social bookmarking systems are produced and rated by real human beings who can actually understand, read and comprehend the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource, and often fails miserably or works on such criteria for rating as how many other sites link to a ressource- which in truth is not much of a guide to quality in my humble opinion.

There are drawbacks to the social bookmarking systems, like anything else- it’s not perfect because:
*No standard set of keywords used
*Humans cause mistagging due to spelling errors
*Some tags that can have more than one meaning may be unclear etc.
*Certain Groups eg. Gamers may have and use words not even in the dictionary with there own ‘in house’ meanings for words which are not known to all or any outside their sphere.

Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and fixing as some webmasters have started considering it as a tool to use
along with search engine optimization to get more traffic to their websites. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being spidered and indexed by search engines. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular or misleading tagstags. Technorati for example sports a daily list of the ‘hottest most popular tags’ each day so it’s not difficult to gauge.

Social Bookmark sites have remedies to spamming and have added CAPTCHA protection against spammer, which may and does cause some problems for people who use social bookmarking for non-spamming purposes. Sometimes the CAPTCHA is unreadable or even falsey reports an error when you do enter it correctly. Many socil bookmark site owners also patrol them carefully looking for evidence of spam and deal with it right away also. Socialbookmarking is more likely than the major search engines to throw up an undiscovered ‘Gem’ that may not have been highly rated otherwise.

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