Social Bookmarking and del.icio.us

Introduction

What is "social bookmarking"?

People talk about it a lot these days, but what, exactly, is social bookmarking? In short, it is an online, public bookmarks system (bookmarks are also known as "favorites", by the way).

If you browse the Web, surely you have some bookmarks saved in your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.), with addresses which you visit regularly, or which you save so you can check them out in more detail, when you have the time. These bookmarks have some faults, however:

• the bookmarks in your home computer aren't available at your office, or at a friend's place, or at a cybercafe
• above a certain number of bookmarks, it becomes hard to find what you need among so many, even when using folders to separate them.

Social bookmarking solves both of these problems. Bookmarks are now online, and, therefore, available to you wherever you are. Furthermore, when adding a new bookmark, you can classify it using tags, which are nothing but one or more words which describe the bookmark, such as "music" or "jobs". After, it's easy to see, for instance, just the bookmarks with a particular tag.

But what about the "social" part? That comes from the following: bookmarks are public. You can browse the bookmarks from anyone who uses the same social bookmarking service. It's also possible to see the newest added bookmarks, or the currently more popular ones (that is, those which are being added by a large number of people). You can also "give" (that is, suggest) any bookmarks to friends.

Features and advantages of social bookmarking

• access all of your bookmarks from any computer that is connected to the Internet
• organize bookmarks through tags - one bookmark can have one or more tags
• share of bookmarks with friends
• find which sites are related to a particular site ("who ever bookmarked this, also bookmarked...")
• view which sites are more popular at a particular time

There are several social bookmarking services, but the most popular one, and which will be used to demonstrate how social bookmarking works, in the next part of the tutorial, is del.icio.us.


Next: how to use del.icio.us