Social bookmarking is a process that allows people to identify and recommend articles for others to find and review. Social bookmarking sites identify articles or web pages that are submitted and reviewed by people who read them. To make it simple for people to review articles or web pages, social bookmarking buttons may be included on article pages to allow readers to quickly connect and submit a recommendation or review.

Bookmarking Sites - Social bookmarking web sites contain lists (indexes) of articles that are categorized. People who are part of the bookmarking site network (members) can submit and review the articles.

Bookmarking sites may employ different techniques for indexing and recommending articles. Some bookmarking sites prioritize the most popular articles first (such as Digg) while other bookmarking sites categorize and more evenly distribute the display of recommendations (such as StumbleUpon). For bookmarking sites that prioritize the most popular articles first, only the most popular articles will be seen by many viewers and lesser popular articles will receive very little web site traffic. Some examples of bookmarking sites include www.Digg.com, www.Stumbleupon.com, and www.reddit.com.

Page Submission - Page submission is the process of identifying a web page to be included in the list of articles on a bookmarking site. To submit an article to a bookmarking site, a person is typically required to setup an account.

Bookmark Recommendation - A bookmark recommendation is the process of providing information that indicates the value of an item (such as an article or web page) for other readers to see. Bookmark recommendations may take the form of voting processes or written reviews. The voting process may utilize a fairly simple yes/no recommendation, or it may include ranking values such as 0 to 5. Bookmark sites may limit votes to one vote per computer to prevent the same person from submitting multiple votes. This voting control process may operate by storing a cookie on the voting computer, or it may use other identifying information, such as invalidating multiple votes that are sent from the same IP address.

Bookmarking Buttons - Bookmarking buttons are links to social bookmarking sites that encourage and simplify how web site visitors can submit a web page to a social bookmarking site. The social media bookmarking button provides the web link of the page to be submitted to the social media bookmarking web site. It may be helpful to create a universal bookmarking button that displays a list of social bookmarking sites with which the reader may be familiar. Each link to a bookmarking site is customized to include the URL of the page so the user will be immediately connected to the specific review page for the article.

This figure shows how social bookmarking can be used to allow people to submit and recommend web sites to help other users find and value content. The process begins when a person submits an article (Article G) to the bookmarking site. The submission process involves providing the web address (URL) of the article, along with classification details, such as business, technology or entertainment. The article is added to an index of other articles that have been submitted to the bookmarking site. The article may also include a bookmarking button that makes it easier for viewers to recommend the article (vote) so others can more easily find it. This example shows that articles with the most number of votes are displayed to viewers first.