Due to the vastness of cyberspace, tools such as social bookmarking have made it easy for Web users to not only have a way of remembering a favorite Web page or website in order to reduce the time spent on searching for them, but also to share these bookmarked Web pages and websites to other Internet users in a collaborative fashion.

It usually involves social bookmarking websites wherein its registered users can add their favorite bookmarks to their accounts using keyword tags to organize them, making it easier for other users or visitors to search for similar topics or subjects that the user has bookmarked

What social bookmarking does is basically it allows Internet users registered in social bookmarking websites to identify sites or search and discover new resources that fall under a particular category that the user has created. These sites our resources could offer something new or useful to the user, depending on the user's preference. Social bookmarking also helps determine if a particular site is trendy and useful or not through a decision made by the community. How this works is that any user can share a bookmark, and the larger community makes a collaborative decision as to whether that bookmark is cool and useful or not. This helps make it easier for other users to navigate through the overwhelming amount of Web-based information.

Although social bookmarking has a lot of advantages to offer the different Internet users who subscribe to such a tool, it is not without its share of disadvantages as well. One draw back with this tag-based system is that there are no standards set for the keywords, controlled terms and vocabulary used. This can create a problem, especially since the tag-based system relies on people, and not on any program created in the Internet. This means that this type of system is not flawless in terms of organizing its different bookmarks since the people are the once organizing the tags, thereby creating an inconsistent standard and management system for tags. People who create the tags just create them according to their own accord, creating confusion with the other users who rely on the tags to find what they are looking for in these social bookmarking websites.

The lack of standards for tag structures, such as capitalization, singular vs. plural, as well as other similar issues, in social bookmarking makes it susceptible to mistagging. This can be caused by misspelling certain words, by tagging certain subjects using keywords that have two or more meanings, by tagging websites and/or Web pages with unclear tags caused by synonym-antonym confusion, or by using unorthodox and too "personalized" tags that other users will not be able to understand or decipher what the tag is about. Aside from these problems, social bookmarking is also susceptible to corruption and collusion due to its popularity. This type of system can be used by users to help make their Web page or website more visible in the Web by optimizing their search engine results.

Fortunately, these disadvantages and problems may be short-lived, especially since social bookmarking services are quickly evolving into becoming a much better tag-based system.

Vanessa Arellano Doctor
http://wirefan.com