Why are social bookmarking sites important for blogs?

IF you are new to the concept of social bookmarking, then this post is you. Actually, there’s so much stuff available in the net on this topic that it might be overwhelming to novices. So I have gleaned sections of posts that deal with social bookmarking. Take a quick glance to prime yourself. Later you might also want to follow the links to learn more.

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What is social bookmarking?

There was a time, none too long ago, when your bookmarks were part of your private domain, hidden away in the browser and stored on your local hard drive. Consequently, what you deemed important – the sites you visited regularly – was no one’s business but your own. Like so many other things on the Internet, Web 2.0 has changed that.

The advent of social bookmarking and sharing sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Ma.gnolia, Blue Dot, Furl, Digg and many others, has made it possible for what was once private to be made public. You can now publish your bookmarks to the open Web, making them available for all to see, use, share and comment upon.

Read more at about.com

Advantages of social bookmarking

In terms of creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. People also tend to find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users (who find it useful, or amusing, or otherwise worthy of remembering and sharing).

Read more at wikipedia
The importance of tagging for social bookmarking sites

Tags are specific keywords that you can use for classifying content (in this case, stories). Once you associate tags with a certain piece of information, this information can be organized accordingly, and made easily retrievable by using the same keyword or keywords.

Tags have become a staple of web 2.0 sites, and especially social bookmarking sites, as they allow a user to sift through large amounts of information and locate exactly what the user is looking for, very efficiently.

Read more at The Mu Life

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How to generate tags and social bookmarking links for your blog

Several sites are there to automatically generate tags and links to social bookmarking sites. Keotag and egmstrategy are a great help.

If you are a wordpress.com blogger, then check out the different ways in which you can create social bookmarking links using different sites.