Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows participants to store and share their bookmarks on the Web.

Why? First of all, your bookmarks are available on all the computers you use. Bookmark it at home and find it again the next day on another computer at work. You can point friends at your bookmark by giving them your account’s URL or adding them to your network.

Your bookmarks also become an element on a social network. Here’s how it works: I find a site I’d like to record. Let’s say it’s a film festival site. I post it to a social bookmarking site (I use del.icio.us). This is easy to do, often a single click on a toolbar link gets you started. As I post, I’m asked to write a description and provide tags, keywords that help to group my bookmarks. For a film festival, I might choose tags like film, festival, cinema, movies, or entertainment. Once posted, the information is recorded on a web site at del.icio.us. Mine is del.icio.us/kruchoga/. The site provides additional information, such as the number of other members who have bookmarked the link, and provides the means to communicate with other members.

These services also report on the most popular and fastest growing sites, providing surfing guidance for members.

In addition to del.icio.us, popular services include simpy, stumbleupon and furl.

Educause has a PDF publication called “7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking.”