What are social bookmarks?

Social Bookmarking sites allow you to store, tag and share links with anyone across the internet. This enables you to store, organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata. In a bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or via a search engine.

Many social bookmarking services also provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organised by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. You can also do things such as rate and comment on bookmarks, import and export bookmarks from browsers and email them.

You will see these bookmark icons on lots of news orientated websites such as the BBC. The main book mark sites are Digg, del.icio.us, reddit and StumbleUpon.