The internet has seen an explosion of social bookmarking sites in recent years, from the massive Digg to small sites that cater to specific niches and industries.  With such a plethora of sites available for people to use it is time that someone attempted to establish just what bookmarking sites are – and why they have suddenly become so popular.

What is a bookmarking site?

At their most basic a bookmarking site is what it sounds like – a site that allows you to bookmark things.  Bookmarks are well known to many people, but for those who are unaware they are simply links that are saved into folders that allow you to come back to a site or page again and again.

They have been used for years on internet browsers, sometimes under different titles such as ‘favorites’.  But the sites allow you to take it from the internet browser and put them onto a website.

Whilst initially that may not seem too worthwhile to you it has actually become a very important tool.  The rise of various access points to the internet – from multiple computers in a home to web browsing mobile phones, PDA’s, web-books etc – means that people are going online from a variety of sources, sources that won’t have all their bookmarks saved.

By using a bookmarking site they are able to access their bookmarks from anywhere in the world, and from any internet access point with web capabilities.

Social Bookmarking

But bookmarking has become a lot more ’social’ than simply entering a list of websites and pages into a piece of software.  Social bookmarking has now become the new buzz of the internet – and led to some massive sites that add benefit to its users and to site owners.

Social bookmarking allows a level of interaction between all users of a bookmarking site.  There are various models available, from Digg where anyone can vote on a page that has been bookmarked, to Stumble upon where people can use a toolbar to access random websites in categories they have selected.

What such sites do is allow users access to other peoples bookmarks – allowing them to network and share ideas, pages and sites with other like minded people.  This means that traffic to websites increases the more a site is shared via bookmarking.  For example reaching the front page of Digg (getting enough people voting for it in a short amount of time so that it becomes one of the big stories on the site) can send tens of thousands, if not more, viewers to one web page!