It is without a doubt that social networking has taken off like a rocket to Mars on the Internet. Sites such as You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and Bebo have reached phenomenal heights in the success stakes, and these are being highly praised by internet users. Online bookmarks at these sites have become a very original way of sharing information and as such are a very useful marketing tool.

Essentially online bookmarking is a tool which lets users rate, organize and share their favorite websites. Other users who have the same interests will pick up this information and visit those sites themselves by clicking on the links available. Rating these sites provides other users with a recommendation regarding what they might be useful for and how useful they are.

Online bookmarks can be used to categorize, organize and rate websites and their value. People who share the same interests are attracted to sites that have been recommended by other like-minded people. Word of mouth in any community has long been considered to be an extremely powerful form of marketing. You only need one bad review and it soon gets around, and the same applies to the good. The magnitude of the internet combined with this makes marketing strategies, nigh unstoppable.

Members of social networking sites bookmark links to these in a specific storage space which they register for. This makes it possible for users to store the links and use them later, and it also makes it possible for them to share these with other users.

Online bookmarking first came into being as far back as 1996, with the first generation of social networking sites. However at that time there was no model in use to actually create money making opportunities. With the growth of affiliate marketing this has now changed.

When you compare the power of online bookmarking to the more traditional system of using a search engine, this is a huge innovation. These sites have a great advantage over normal search engines. The organizing, categorizing and rating is conducted by humans and not a search engine machine. No matter how complex the algorithms contained in a search engine, they still cannot beat the human touch.

These powerful marketing tools have effectively set off a bookmarking revolution on the web. There is no comparison between online social bookmaking and traditional search engines. This is because people organize, rate and rank sites, not a search engine. No matter the complex algorithms used in search engines, they cannot beat the impact humans have.

It is the human touch which makes online bookmarks such a revolutionary marketing tool, the sites are ranked according to the how often they have been used as well as how many times a particular keyword has been used. It is these factors which make bookmarking a powerful social, information sharing and marketing tool.