Question: What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is one of the biggest trends of the last decade on the Web. What is social bookmarking, and why is it so popular?
Answer: Social bookmarking refers to the practice of saving and categorizing a particular site and sharing it with others via social bookmarking communities.
Users can share their own personal Web bookmarks, but they also have the quite wonderful option of discovering other people’s bookmarks and adding them to their own collection. More sites can be discovered, more treasures unearthed, if you work together as a whole instead of by yourself; it’s truly amazing what people are able to turn up together on the Web.
Examples of social bookmarking Web sites:
- del.icio.us: del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to: Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
- Furl: Furl gives users the ability to save copies of any Web page, search within your own personal archive of Web pages, and share what you find. Furl was one of the very first social bookmarking tools, and continues to be one that people use to find and share good stuff on the Web.
- Reddit: Instantly share your content with the Reddit social bookmarking community.
- Yahoo My Web: Sure, search engines have revolutionized how people obtain information, but nothing takes the place of recommendations from people you know. My Web 2.0 lets you instantly tap into the knowledge of people with related or completely new interests so you can share what they know.
- Stumbleupon: The beauty of StumbleUpon, to my mind: you are able to take advantage of a vast network of dedicated Web searchers who are finding utterly brilliant sites and sharing them with you. One of my favorite ways to explore the Web.
