The first obvious benefit of sharing links in a community is the discovery of new good sources by browsing other people lists.  The system can assist in this discovery by suggesting interesting pieces. 

But it is not the only imaginable advantage. Another one would be 'coordinated reading' where you divide a list of shared bookmarks into parts, each participant reads his part and then reports (by for example marking the bookmark) when he found something that would be interesting for others, or even by just one participant - then he would mark it in a way visible by only this particular participant (that's SocialRouting!).

I believe there are others benefits to be discovered.


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=== Discussion ===

So you'd end up with specialists readers and trackers, who then share with each other? But how do they / to what degree to they share? I suppose "this is worth reading but that isn't" they tell the other members of the group. Or maybe they try to summarize?

I wonder if there's any benefit to having some kind of formal representation of the group and the individual comitments / specializations. Reminds me a bit of my (semi-joke) RecoveringGeneralistNetwork

* http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?RecoveringGeneralistNetwork

-- PhilJones
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Related: 
* Established shared bookmarks system: http://del.icio.us and article about it: [http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/08/16.html#a1060 Information routing]
* Many to Many on shared bookmarking services : http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/07/13/social_link_management.php
* ActiveBookmarks
* StigmergicSystems (http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?StigmergicSystems) ?
* What I called coordinated reading is called Delegation on CommunityWiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/DelegateAgainstInformationOverload