Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is way to collect, organise and store a list of web pages that interest a user and they want to remember and share with others either publicly or privately. Other users can save bookmarks and make comments about the websites which enriches this collaborative online activity. Popular social bookmarking sites are Delicious, Furl and Twine.
Most social bookmarking sites give the owner control over who has access to their list of links. They can be open to the public or available to private groups only. Users are encouraged to label links with tags—short descriptions that describe the content of the page. A tag could be as simple as the word ’cat’ or it could be a phrase such as ’cat training tips’.
Users can subscribe to particular keywords, or combinations of words, to keep up to date with new links as they appear. Other users may be able to comment on the accuracy of these tags.
Some sites, such as Digg, take the social aspect even further, encouraging users to continually vote on the value of submitted news and internet ‘stories’. The Digg community, for example, submits content such as news, images, videos and blogs for others to discover, select, share or discuss. In reviewing and commenting on material, popular stories stay high on the list, while less popular stories quickly disappear.
Social bookmarking is useful because it ensures that bookmarks are available from any computer. This is also referred to as bookmarking ‘in the cloud’, meaning that the information is not tied to a particular piece of hardware.
Some people use social bookmarking sites to do online searches, instead of using search engines. This is because every web page that’s listed on a social bookmarking site has been added by a person with an interest in the subject, rather than by software that simply scans the web.
On the downside, keywords or tags in social bookmarking sites are not standard and misspellings or inaccurate tagging can lessen the quality of some lists.
Before building a list, spend some time on a social bookmarking site doing searches. Once comfortable with how the search function works, and how effectively tags help to refine those searches, start building a list of links.