In the past few years, the Internet has been taken back by individuals from the institutions. The advent of Web 2.0 has seen this happen in a quick and easy manner. Blogs, Social Networking Websites, and Social Book marking are new concepts that have been achieved wild success in the past few years.

Social book marking allows Internet users to store and share their bookmarks, links of any websites they may have liked. These links can then be shared either with a private group, or can be viewed and accessed by anyone who visits the social book marking website.

There are various social book marking websites today. Most of these websites will show what sites their users liked and disliked to anyone, but the more advanced features would require one to sign up on the social book marking website.

Though Social Book marking has been very popular since the 2000s, it first started in 1996. however, due to the lack of a proper business plan and the dot com bubble burst, it was not much of a success.

Social book marking made a comeback somewhere in 2003, with major companies planning out social book marking websites. Web 2.0 has made the success of social book marking possible.

Social book marking is very beneficial to the casual as well as a advanced internet user. Many a times, there are certain software applications available on the Internet, whose links are difficult to find for the casual user. This is where the social bookmarks can help people. It is also useful for open source software. Many open source software do not have the common bookmarks and are hosted on non-commercial servers. Social book marking helps people find these links too.

Social book marking is good news for article marketing. People marketing products can write about their product on a article marketing website, and then submit their links to a social book marking website. This will give a dual traffic to their articles.

One of the biggest features of social book marking websites is tagging, that is, users can tag their bookmarks in a group.

Social book marking has grown since it had first come up. Today, they have enhanced themselves and also offer more features than previously done. For example, most book marking websites offer the users a chance to rank their bookmarks. Of course, all this works towards the popularity of the link that they have submitted.

Some social book marking websites also offer a feature through which their users can create feeds of their bookmarks. With this, users can get RSS feeds of any links that are added to the website immediately.

There are, however, some disadvantages of Social book marking. However, since Social book marking is a user-based concept, these disadvantages are more about unscrupulous use of social book marking than any problems in the concept itself.

Some spammers use social book marking tools to spam. Also, users who are not conversant with the Internet will not be able to give proper information to the users of social book marking websites.

Some social book marking websites offer their users their own toolbars, which keep a record of the links that they have bookmarked.

Copyright (c) 2008 Colin Meunier