Social bookmarking despite being around for over 10 years really began to take off over the last few years, but what is it? Put simply it’s a way of storing and sharing your bookmarks online. There are many good reasons to do this, firstly the selfish ones (always the most important reason) storing bookmarks on your work or personal computer is all well and good but what if you aren’t on your own computer? Or you’re at work and you don’t want the IT department seeing which sites you’ve bookmarked (especially the non work related ones)? For these 2 reasons and many more it makes sense to have all your bookmarks stored online, with a quick and simple log in wherever you are you’ve got a full list of bookmarks be it to your favourite news sites to academic reference sites. The social bookmarking sites normally provide a much more accurate and user friendly approach to storing your bookmarks.
Then add to this the community aspect of social bookmarking, you (and all the other users) choose which bookmarks to make public and which to keep private. This is where the real power of social bookmarking lies, why waste hours trawling through endless search engine results pages before finding the right site, with social bookmarking you get to use the efforts of your fellow bookmarkers to save you valuable time. Put in a search of say your favourite band and up pops all the bookmarks you’re fellow bookmarkers have publicly stored and rated. This all works on the very simple democratic premise that if 500 members of a community say this site is good it’s probably better than the one 100 members say is good.
Bookmarking Websites
Now comes the difficult bit which social bookmarking service to use? Based on the same ranking system used for the bookmarks we’ll use their own recipe on them so we’ll deal with the most popular here which quite conveniently also happens to be 8ball’s Choice.
By far the most popular bookmarking site (and 8Balls favourite) is del.icio.us with over 3 million users it’s by far the most popular social bookmarking site on the web.
Del.icio.us has a superb search and sharing facility making it an excellent place to explore whether you use it to store your bookmarks or not. It’s very simple and easy to use with a good backend API, with browser toolbars and Firefox plugs in available integrating it with your favourite browser is simple and effective. The only real drawbacks of del.icio.us is the lack of page caching so if the page with the information on it is removed by its owner all the information is lost, to be fair though with all the pages their users have bookmarked caching this would require some serious effort.
8Ball’s runner up is stumbleupon.com which offers many of the same facilities as del.icio.us but with a more random results system, so if you’re feeling adventurous this could be the one for you.
But whichever you choose social bookmarking will improve your web browsing experience, and after an afternoon of looking round the different bookmarking sites the biggest difficulty was not getting sidetracked with the wealth of information on any given topics these sites help provide.
