How to use social boomarking

You have just discovered a website that you this has some really useful content that you would like to re-visit. You also think that the website would be really useful to your friends or colleagues. How do you save and share this link?

Before you would copy and paste the link somewhere and email it, or perhaps add it to your browser’s favorites tab – but with the tools available today, the process is a lot easier.

While many users are already aware of these tools, we just wanted to share them with you in case you haven’t tried them.

As the web gets more and more profound, and there’s more to read and remember, browser bookmarking becomes less and less desirable to internet savvy users. Social bookmarking is a method of bookmarking which is posted online, catalogued with comments and “tags” (labels for your bookmarks), and shared with your friends.

Steps

1. Decide which site you are going to use to store your bookmarks; the most popular tagging site is http://del.icio.us/ , which is now owned by Yahoo!. We will use this site, but the steps correspond to most social bookmarking sites. Other possibilities include Furl, BlinkList, and Magnolia.
2. Register at del.icio.us. After registering, del.icio.us will allow you to add some buttons to your browser. Follow the instructions- these buttons are important for bookmarking. There are many ways to add bookmarks to del.icio.us, including a Firefox extension, but we will use this method.
3. Once you register with del.icio.us, say with the username “xyz”, you can view all your bookmark online as http://del.icio.us/xyz .
4. Say, for example, you would like to bookmark wikiHow. Go to the main page, and click the “Tag” button that you added to your browser. This button will bring you to del.icio.us- the website and title are already filled in, so add some comments and some tags. Tags for wikiHow would include “wiki”, “howto”, and “reference”. Separate these tags with spaces to distinguish them. These tags will be useful later when you are trying to find a specific bookmark.
5. You can navigate del.icio.us by URL; for example, you can see all the bookmarks saved by you and other users who have tagged with the description “wiki” at this address: http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki . This applies to any other tag if you switch the word.

Tips

• Make sure you use the same tags for the same things- keep a core list of tags in your mind.
• Del.icio.us has a feature which allows you to group similar tags together, called “bundles”. For example, the tags “baseball”, “coins”, and “stamps” would all be grouped together under the bundle “Hobbies”.
• Social bookmarking is meant to be social- invite your friends to use the service. Once they have registered, you can apply the tag “for:friendsusername” to let them know that they should check out that bookmark. When they log in (this works both ways), del.icio.us will embolden the text “links for you” at the top of the page. If they click that link, they will see that you have tagged something for them.
• Most del.icio.us pages have RSS feeds- you can subscribe to your friend’s bookmarks, a specific tag, bookmarks for you, your bookmarks, etc.
• Del.icio.us also allows you to subscribe to specific tags inside the website. Click subscribe at the top of the page and add that tag you want to be up-to-date on. You can also subscribe a RSS feed of your subscriptions.

Social bookmarking tools we personally recommend:

• Stumble Upon » http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• Digg » http://digg.com/
• Delicious » https://secure.delicious.com/

Sources and Citations

• Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• What is Social Bookmarking?
• del.icio.us help
• Tagging
• del.icio.us tools

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Use Social Bookmarking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.