How Popular Web-based Services are Revolutionizing Online Sharing

Every time you look up a fact on Wikipedia, follow a favourite writer’s blog, or share an interesting article on social media, you are using a web-based service built for one purpose: making it easy to create and share information. These platforms have quietly reshaped how knowledge moves around the world. They have shifted us from a web where a few people published and everyone else only read, to one where anyone with an internet connection can contribute, collaborate, and connect. This post looks at three of the most influential categories of these services, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking and networking tools, and explains how each one works and why it matters for information sharing.

The shift from reading to participating 🔗

The early web was largely a one-way street. Organisations and a handful of skilled coders built websites, and the rest of us simply visited them. The arrival of what is often called Web 2.0 changed this completely. Web 2.0 describes a generation of internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, and communication tools that let people collaborate and share information online in ways that were not possible before.

The defining idea is participation. Instead of passively consuming content, users now create it, organise it, comment on it, and pass it along. This is sometimes called harnessing collective intelligence, where the combined contributions of many users enrich a service for the whole community. The three categories below are the clearest examples of this principle in action.

Wikis: building knowledge together 🔗

A wiki is a website that allows multiple users to collaboratively create, edit, and organise content directly through a web browser. The word comes from the Hawaiian term “wiki wiki”, meaning fast, which reflects the speed at which a group can document and share information together. Unlike a traditional website managed by a single owner, a wiki is designed as an open platform where contributions are shared and continually refined.

How a wiki actually works 🔗

Wikis run on a few core features. First is collaborative editing: anyone with permission can add a page, expand an existing one, or correct an error. Second is interlinking, where related pages are connected through hyperlinks to form an interconnected web of knowledge that is easy to navigate. Third, and perhaps most important, is version control. Every edit is recorded and timestamped, creating a page history that lets users track who changed what, compare versions, and roll back damaging edits. This revision history is what makes open editing trustworthy, because mistakes and vandalism can be reversed quickly.

Wikipedia and beyond 🔗

The most famous example is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It began in 2001 when Larry Sanger proposed using a wiki as a “feeder” for drafting articles for the earlier Nupedia project, and it grew into one of the most visited websites in the world. Its strength comes directly from collaboration: because anyone can edit an article and anyone can improve another person’s edit, articles develop far faster and draw on the experience of many contributors rather than one. Scholars describe this combination of expertise and transparent collaboration as open authority, a model where expert knowledge is strengthened by being put to public use rather than weakened by openness.

Wikis are not limited to encyclopedias. Wikitravel applies the same model to travel guides, letting travellers around the world contribute up-to-date advice on destinations. Specialised wikis document everything from films and games to scientific fields. In workplaces, tools like Confluence and DokuWiki serve as internal knowledge bases, replacing scattered emails and fragmented documents with a single, transparent space where teams co-create and maintain shared information. For libraries, wikis offer a way to build subject guides and engage users in adding to a collection’s knowledge.

Blogs: from personal diaries to knowledge hubs 🔗

A blog, short for “weblog”, is a regularly updated website made up of entries, or posts, displayed in reverse-chronological order so the newest content appears first. The format is simple, but its impact on information sharing has been enormous.

The evolution of blogging 🔗

Blogs began in the late 1990s as online diaries, where individuals logged their daily lives and shared links to interesting websites. These early blogs had to be updated manually and often required some knowledge of HTML. Everything changed when dedicated platforms arrived. Blogger, created by Pyra Labs in 1999, let people publish without any technical expertise, and platforms such as LiveJournal and later WordPress widened access still further. Suddenly anyone with an internet connection could reach a global audience.

Through the 2000s, blogs grew from personal journals into a mainstream format for news, commentary, and professional publishing. They expanded into niches like technology, travel, education, and finance, and as mainstream media began to take notice, bloggers started to influence public discussion on current events. This evolution broke down the traditional gatekeeping of information, where only professional publishers could decide what got shared, and created a far more participatory flow of information in which readers could also become creators.

Why blogs matter for knowledge sharing 🔗

Blogs have become a key channel for sharing expertise for several reasons. They allow in-depth discussion that short social media posts cannot accommodate, making them ideal for tutorials, analysis, and storytelling. They enable real-time feedback, because comment sections let readers ask questions and add their own perspectives, turning a post into a conversation. They also support a wide range of formats, from text to photo blogs, video blogs known as vlogs, and audio posts known as podcasts. For students and professionals, maintaining a niche blog has become a recognised way to demonstrate knowledge, build credibility, and contribute to a wider community of practice.

Social bookmarking and networking: saving, sharing, and connecting 🔗

The third category covers services that help people save useful content, share it with others, and communicate directly. These platforms turn the simple act of bookmarking into a social and collaborative activity.

What social bookmarking does 🔗

Traditional bookmarks live in your browser and only you can see them. Social bookmarking moves them online. A social bookmarking service is a centralised online tool that lets users store, organise, and share links to web pages, articles, images, and other resources within a community. The defining feature is that these collections are shareable: you can browse what others have saved on a topic and discover resources you would never have found alone.

The classic example is Delicious, founded in 2003, which became known as the original king of social bookmarking. Delicious organised links using tags, which work like flexible keywords, and grouped links sharing a common tag together. Users could follow other people, see who else had saved the same page, and build a network of like-minded strangers who effectively combed the web on each other’s behalf. Other services in this space have included Digg, StumbleUpon, and Diigo, the last of which adds the ability to highlight and annotate pages, making it useful for collaborative research.

Tagging and folksonomy 🔗

Tagging is more than a convenience; it represents a different approach to organising information. When large numbers of users freely assign their own keywords to resources, the result is a folksonomy, a classification system that emerges from the bottom up rather than being imposed by experts. This matters a great deal in library and information science, because it contrasts with traditional controlled vocabularies and formal subject headings. Folksonomies are flexible and reflect how real users actually describe things, though they come with challenges such as inconsistent spelling and a lack of standard terms. Researchers have studied how this collective tagging changes information retrieval, and some libraries have experimented with letting patrons add tags to catalogue records to make collections more dynamic and easier to search laterally.

Social networking and microblogging 🔗

Social networking platforms extend sharing into direct communication and community building. Twitter (now X) is a leading example of microblogging, a format where users post very short messages and interact with others through replies, reposts, and likes. Its power lies in speed and reach: a single link or idea can spread across a vast network in minutes. People follow not only friends but also experts, journalists, public figures, and organisations, which makes these platforms an efficient way to discover and amplify information.

The lines between these categories have steadily blurred. Delicious itself later added the ability to log in with Twitter and Facebook and to automatically save links shared on those networks, while microblogging platforms like Tumblr let users reblog content in a way that resembles bookmarking. Together, social bookmarking and networking services have created new opportunities for people to connect, exchange ideas, and spread information faster than ever before.

What ties these services together 🔗

Wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking and networking tools may look different, but they share a common DNA. Each one lowers the barrier to participation, so creating and sharing content no longer requires technical skill or professional gatekeeping. Each one relies on community, where the value of the service grows as more people contribute. And each one treats information as something living and shareable rather than fixed and owned. For anyone studying information products and services, these platforms are not just websites to use; they are working models of how knowledge is organised, exchanged, and improved in the digital age.

What do you think? Which type of web-based service do you rely on most for learning and sharing information, and why? And as user-generated tagging continues to grow alongside expert-built classification systems, do you think folksonomies will eventually complement traditional library organisation, or will the two always remain separate?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_bookmarking_websites
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Collaborations
3. https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/historians-in-wikipedia-building-an-open-collaborative-history-december-2012/
4. https://www.wix.com/blog/what-is-a-blog
5. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/bachelor-of-journalism/history-of-blogs/59175369
6. https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/10-popular-social-bookmarking-websites/
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261874046_Social_Bookmarking_as_a_Knowledge_Sharing_Tool