Social Bookmarking: Saving Sites of Interest

You've seen this button on mine, and other blogs or websites:

But what the heck does it mean? If you click it, you'll be asked to select a social bookmarking service with which to save, or bookmark, the website you are currently visiting. The concept of website bookmarking (also called "favorites" on some browsers) has been around for a long time, but social bookmarking is a whole new spin on storing and sharing your favorite web destinations.

Social bookmarking is a way of saving interesting online articles, videos, and other web pages in a personal account online. This means that you can access them from any computer connected to the internet at any time. On top of that, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Bookmarks, and Technorati allow you to register a personal or shared account, save bookmarks, organize and tag them however you want, and share them with others on the web.

Here are some other cool things you can do with social bookmarking:

• Find and rate new online favorites by visiting sites that other people have bookmarked.


• Suggest sites to your friends by tagging a link with your friend's username.


• Doing a research paper or group project on monkeys? Bookmark resources online and tag them with "monkeys" or "research" and share the links with your whole team.


• If you are particularly interested in a certain subject, there are social bookmarking sites geared around specific topics of interest too! For example, if you're a tech junkie, you can get your fix of popular technology articles, blogs, and sites on Technorati.


• For most social bookmarking services, you can download a bookmarking button for your web browser, allowing you to bookmark sites with just one click.