Social Bookmarking
We all know the value of bookmarks, or "favorites," which allow us to store links to useful web sites on our personal computer. Unfortunately, these personal bookmarks are tied to one computer - you can’t bring them with you when you move to a different one. Social bookmarking, on the other hand, allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet.
With social bookmarking, you store your bookmarks in a shared public site provided by one of the many free social bookmarking services. Some of the more popular services are del.icio.us, Wink, Furl, and ma.gnolia. By storing your bookmarks in a public site rather than through your web browser, you can access them from anywhere. And by storing them in a shared site, other people can access them as well, and that's where the "social" part of the term social bookmarking comes from.
When you add a bookmark using one of these services, you can add a descriptive "tag," or keyword, to each bookmark you save. By tagging pages, you can classify them and organize them into groups. Everyone else using the service can search by tags to find bookmarks relevant to their interests. By looking at bookmarks saved by other people, especially by others with similar interests, you can discover relevant web pages that you might not have found otherwise.
So if the idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone, and see what others have bookmarked appeals to you, you might want to try social bookmarking. For a comparison of some of the different social bookmarking services, see the following:
Social Bookmarking Showdown, Wired Magazine, Nov. 6, 2006
J. Fusaris
