Let's face it; the web is a vast, seemingly endless host of information and sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all the good stuff you find out there. This, my friends, is where social bookmarking comes into play.
What is it?
Social bookmarking essentially allows you to organize your online resources. It is much like dog-earring the page of a book. You might want to save web pages for yourself or to share with others (Because they might just be that cool!). The old school way of doing this was to bookmark pages in your web browser so you could come back to them. This way only allowed you to keep track of them though, and wasn't conducive to sharing.
What makes bookmarking "Social?"
Take the old style of browser bookmarking and make it into a website! A few of these sites are:Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. Websites like these allow you to bookmark your favorite, useful or interesting findings in a place where everyone can see and find them!
It's so much more organized, and useful!
Bookmarking in the old way didn't give you much control over categorizing your bookmarks-it just sort of dumped them all into one place. You can see how it would easily become more unorganized with each new bookmark you added. Social bookmarking allows you to "tag" your bookmarks with keywords. This lets others search for bookmarks within particular categories, and even expand them by adding their own bookmarks.
Bookmarks with benefits
Say you are blogging about Charlie Sheen, and you can't seem to find any good information. A social bookmarking site might have a category for actors and one for Charlie Sheen. All you've got to do is click on over and find it. Others have already done the work for you! It's a win-win situation. You get a great way to organize your personal bookmarks and then it is shared with others.
What else...
One of the most interesting parts of social bookmarking is that no two people think alike. Someone else may tag a site in a way you never considered-and that leads you in more directions-to more possibly valuable information.
See a list of some of the most popular social bookmarking sites here.
Sources:
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (Educause)
Social Bookmarking in Plain English (Common Craft)