A new "social order"

Social bookmarking also brings into the picture another means of determining what is important information on the Web. Before social media, it was the established, traditional media that was considered as trustworthy sources of information. Online news sites like the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the like were considered trustworthy because of their journalistic integrity. Corporate websites, meanwhile, were trusted because companies had reputations to protect.

Social bookmarking, meanwhile, uses the concept of trust among peers, friends and acquaintances to determine which information is relevant (usually also trustworthy, but not always). For instance, if a friend of mine says a certain site contains something interesting, then I will most likely visit that site, too, and perhaps even add it to my own bookmarks. This is especially effective if the people within my online network of friends have similar interests.

Also, social bookmarking can use the concept of discussion and collaboration among peers to determine what information should be considered relevant. Some systems use active methods of "voting," and the items that have the most votes are then "promoted" as news of the day. Other systems, meanwhile, use a passive method of determining what is important. These gauge the number of times an item has been bookmarked over long durations, and these are considered to be popular.