The technology behind social bookmarking is not compl ex,
which means the threshold to par ticipate is low, both for Web
sites of fering such ser vices and for users. The ideas that social
bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applica
tions;
the practice of tagging information is being extended to
other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail.
This shif t away from formal taxonomies may have impor tant
implications for how user communities are born and how they
function. As the landscape for online resources changes and new
systems of classif ying those resources emerge and mature, the
design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be
changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.