Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, manage, share, and organize bookmarks of web pages. These differ from traditional bookmarks in that they are stored on the web, rather than in your browser. If you’ve ever emailed a link to a friend, saved a web page as a favorite in your web browser, organized your internet shortcuts into a local folder on your computer, or told someone that their opinion of a web page’s subject matter was inferior to yours, you have performed some of the individual functions that social bookmarks offer. Different methods of social bookmarking consolidate these functions into a highly accessible medium to bring order to the chaos of traditional bookmarks.

The Anarchy of Traditional Bookmarks

When you are on a website and feel that the content is something you may want to refer to at a later date, you probably bookmark it or save it in your “favorites.” This works well on a small scale, and as long as you only access the internet from that particular computer on which the bookmark is stored. The biggest problem with traditional bookmarks, in my opinion, is that they are only tied to one computer.figure 1). Given the fact that there are literally billions of web pages on the internet, your odds of doing this are not good. If you were away from that computer and wanted to access that link, you would have no way of doing so outside of finding it again (see

Figure 1 - Your current bookmarking situation

This brings me to my next point. Given that there are so many sites out there, you may find that your once readable bookmark list has, in time, become a jumbled, unorganized mess. You may accumulate so many bookmarks that the concept itself has been rendered useless by the magnitude of your list.

If you want to share a page with someone, you would probably go to that page via your bookmarks list, copy the URL, and email it to your friends. If you wanted to share that same bookmark with a friend at a later date, you’d have to repeat the process all over again. If you don’t have any friends, ignore any information on sharing links and replace all instances and variants of “social bookmarking” in this article with “advanced bookmarking for those without any friends.”

Bringing Order To Your Browsing

With social bookmarking, the process of keeping track of your favorite sites is simplified. There are many different social bookmarking sites, each with their own unique approach to organization of bookmarks. Getting started is as simple as creating a free account on one of these sites and acclimating yourself with its interface.

Social bookmarking sites include sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Technorati. Getting started is as easy as setting up a free account on one of these sites and acclimating yourself with the interface. As previously mentioned, these sites facilitate the storage and organization of your bookmarks on the internet, so they can be accessed from anywhere.

By making your bookmarks public, you not only expand their reach when you’re looking to access them, but you can more easily share them with many others. Your friends and fans on social bookmarking sites can easily view your public bookmarks, making sharing effortless. Each of these sites has their own way of interacting with their respective communities. Going over each individual site’s methodology is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ll touch on a couple of the interactive functions here. These additional functions include ranking bookmarks, leaving comments on them, tagging them, and sharing them with your friends. Social bookmarking also categorizes bookmarks and recommends ones that other users are interested in.

Remember, each site is different, so explore the different sites, find which ones are right for you, and simplify your life on the net!