by Sharon Hurley Hall

Created on: March 24, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Social bookmarking works like adding bookmarks or favourites in your browser. The difference is that you get to share those bookmarks with others. And instead of just adding a link, you can use tags, which are words or descriptions to identify the bookmarks. That makes it easy to find the bookmarks again and to see what others have tagged in the same way.

One of the best known social bookmarking sites is del.icio,us, but there are many others including Blinklist, Blogmarks, Diigo, Furl, Kaboodle, ma.gnolia, Simpy , Spurl and Wink, to name just a few. New ones spring up all the time and some disappear.

All social bookmarking sites are easy to join, usually with just a simple form and verification. Then you can start bookmarking. The easy way to bookmark is to use a bookmarklet (which is a browser button you click on when you come across a page you want to bookmark). A dialog will open which will allow you to add tags and comments, and sometimes excerpts of the page. The better your tags are, the better the social bookmarking service will work for you.

Social bookmarking is also a good way to build traffic for your site. Sites like Digg, which work on the same principle, can cause a server overload if your stuff is too popular.

If you want to bookmark on several sites at once, you can use a site like Onlywire or use the options in Diigo.

On many sites you csn make friends with people who are tagging the same sites. A great example of this is StumbleUpon.

Learn more about this author, Sharon Hurley Hall.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.