Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.
Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.
There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.
Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.
See also:
- Del.icio.us – Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
- Yahoo! MyWeb – similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
- Google Notebook – allows you to note documents
- Slashdot – tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
- Digg – decentralized news site
- Netscape – Digg clone
- Google Video – Google’s video hosting, tagging, and search site
- YouTube – popular decentralized video site