If you spend a lot of time on the web, you probably have some favorite websites-- places you like to visit now and again or places you want to share with friends or colleagues. Unless you have a stellar memory, you most likely save the addresses of these sites using the Favorites or Bookmarks folder on your browser. This method is great if you only ever use one computer, but if you want to access your work bookmarks at home, or your home bookmarks at work, you're out of luck!
Social bookmarking allows you to save your favorite sites on the web so you can get to them from any computer anywhere in the world. Simply create a free account with a social bookmarking site (delicious, Digg, Furl, Reddit) and start marking your links. Many of these services have "bookmarklets", little one-click buttons, you can add to your browser to make bookmarking your favorite sites even easier.
Well, that's the bookmarking part-- what about the "social" aspect?
When you bookmark a website using a service like del.icio.us, Furl or others, you not only save it to your own personal account, you are also making the site public-- announcing, in a sense, "this website is notable-- check it out!". The homepages of social bookmarking sites generally display the most popular items at any given time. You can use these lists to discover new websites or expand your interest in a topic. Not interested in declaring your favorite websites to the world? No problem-- most services allow you to make your bookmarks "private".
What is Tagging?
If you have a lot of bookmarks saved to your computer, you may use folders to organize your favorites by topic or other criteria. Social bookmarks generally rely on user-generated keywords or "tags" for organization. The advantage of assigning tags to a bookmarked website, rather than placing it in a folder, is that the link to this website can now reside in multiple places. Take a look at this delicious bookmark for a gardening website:
It has four tags-- words that I have chosen to describe the site. Now, I don't have to remember the name of the site, just that one of the keywords. This method of assigning keywords to your bookmarks can come in handy if you have dozens or hundreds of items bookmarked.
These browser extensions will allow you to integrate your computer's existing favorites into delicious and make adding new bookmarks very easy. With just one click you can automatically add the URL and name of the page that you are on to your delicious account-- all you have to do is add tags.
Follow the instructions for adding delicious bookmarklets to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome). These buttons will allow you to "tag" sites and view your bookmarks easily.
Social Bookmarking
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