Social Bookmarking: Intro, Videos and Links

What is social bookmarking? “A method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata [data about data].”  Wikipedia

This short and charming video explains how social bookmarking works.  Don’t miss it.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English (video)  Commoncraft

What Does Social Bookmarking Look Like?

Here are Beth Kanter’s recent Delicious links on social bookmarking.  (She’s a Web 2.0 guru.) To see what she has bookmarked on a particular subject, click the “Tags” tab and then click on a topic of interest.

Get Started Links

Delicious, Furl, Simpy and Stumbleupon are all examples of social bookmarking websites.

You can explore Delicious right now, without an account.  Type  www.delicious.com/tag/anykeyword  into your browser.  For example, www.delicious.com/tag/creditscore.  (If your keyword is a phrase with two words, omit the space.)  Then see a list of links to website pages and blog posts that others have bookmarked on your favorite topic.

How is a search using Delicious tags different than a Google search?  With Delicious, tagging is done by all of us, not a computer algorithm.  This may mean you get more relevant results.  The blue boxes to the right of each item show the number of people who have bookmarked an item.  And the person who bookmarked the page may also have written descriptions or comments about it.

To learn how to use social bookmarks, just watch this video, or read step by step instructions at the link below the video.

Getting Started with Delicious (video) Lisa Davis

Delicious instructions for “Getting Started”

Social Bookmarking Website alternatives:

Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites, traffic statistics and links to them.  Delicious is just one of those thirty.  The old name was Del.icio.us, but they have recently dropped the periods.

The Social Bookmarking Faceoff Comparison of alternative social bookmarking sites.

More Info

Are Your Business Bookmarks Delicious? Shari Voigt describes how tags can be used for market reseach and how teams with a joint account can organize references and links for a project.

Four Effective Ways to Get Your Blog Listed on the del.icio.us Popular Pages DoshDosh blog

Social Bookmarking Wikipedia

Update:  Beth Kanter just stopped by and left two links in a comment, but they deserve more exposure.  Great ideas about how people, in this case in a nonprofit organization, can work together to share knowledge.

Tagging for Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Tagging Screencast

Peg’s Experience with Delicious

I’m using Delicious for tagging articles on the web.  I have “bundled” (grouped) web pages on topics like Blogging and Facebook.  You can see the 5 most recent items I have bookmarked on those topics on the lower right of this blog.

You can also “subscribe” for free to all items that I bookmark on a particular topic.  Just click the link for one of those bundles, scroll down to the lower left and find the orange RSS icon on the page.  Click to subscribe.   See more on subscribing to blogs (and RSS feeds like these Delicious bundles) at this link. The ex-librarian in me just loves being able to create my own “card catalog” without printing out all these pages and posts:  I love Delicious.

What’s your experience with social bookmarks?  Please tell me in a comment.

See other posts in my Online Marketing Series, which has 20 link-rich posts on 18 online marketing techniques.