What Why & How to Social Bookmark

What

Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Social bookmarking allows users to save, classify, share, discover, and vote on their favorite links publicly or privately on the web.

This new web2.0 service replace the old process of adding to your "favorites" by saving them onto one private computer. Not only do you now have access from any computer you also get more information saved and attached your link such as:

*title and address
*when you saved the link
*notes you can attach about website to the saved link
*how many other people also saved that site and what tags they used
*set privacy sharing settings-if you want to keep private or make public
*some services even offer social annotation tools such as highlighters and stickynotes that get attached to your save web pages.

Besides saving your links, social bookmarking has become a knowledge mangement tool for organizations and networks of people to organize and share their web information. The second utility these bookmarking services provide are they can be used as a powerful social research and annotation tool.

Why

Ericka MenchenTrevino created a efficient visualization that provides "Three Ways to View Social Bookmarking Systems" that helps to illustrate how it all works.

Top: You have one web page with multiple users saving or "favoriting" the link under multiple tags. This first scenario demonstrates the social web2.0 principle of folksonomy. When a community is classifying and making meaning it gives a common concept or label for others to rally around and collaborate on (see Part 4: What is Folksonomy - Why & How to Tag). Another benifit is that instead of saving your link in one folder of a sub-folder you can save a link to multiple different tags which makes it much easier to find later.

Middle: Here you have one tag (a popular name for a category used to label), and multiple users finding links related to that tag and sharing their filtered research to a public network. Each time some one saves a web page it also counts as a vote of popularity that creates a buzz around what members of a community find interesting. This allows the members to nominate and vote up the blogs, articles, news, video, links that they recommend and rather than having an editor at the top choosing what the consumers will be exposed to in a magazine. This principle in the web2.0 world has been named the long tail where the minority in a distribution graph can cause a "tipping point." Social bookmarking also provides a good example of how the wisdom of the crowds principle works. When you have multiple users searching, filtering sharing, and tagging their web research a collective human intelligence builds and evolves. It is this social meaning making that will eventually push us to the web3.0 the Semantic web. This community of collaborated knowledge allows other members to tap the human research rather than mathematical algorithm computer google search. For example, for this blog I did most of my research by browsing under the "bookmarking" tag in the delicious social bookmarking community. I was able to sort through an already human filtered list of all the most popular, current, relevant, and interesting websites related to bookmarking. Furthermore most major social bookmarking services allow you to subscribe via RSS (see Part 2: What is RSS - How and Why to Subscribe) to particular tag and track in real time what the people in the live web are finding most interesting and relevant.

Bottom: Here you have one user with all their tags, called a tag cloud, storing and classifying all their favorite links. These tag clouds - a list of all your tags in alphabetical or most popular order - give you a reflection of your interest and a sense of how you think.

Not only do these tags provide an opportunity for self-learning but they also allow you to see tag clouds of other members in the community in which you can join their network and subscribe to their links so you can track what they are searching and saving on the web.

How

Choose a social bookmarking service. To right is a picture listing the names and the icons of some of the major players. Social Bookmarking Top Sites is a good blog post that lists, ranks, and describes.

For me I have been using delicious for over a year and I swear by it. A couple months ago, I added diigo which can sync with delicious and adds advanced social annotation features (highlighting and sticky notes).

Once you choose and register for a social bookmarking service you will have to add a bookmarklet. This bookmarklet is normally dragged and dropped into your internet browser tool bar. This link acts as shortcut button that you click on when you have a webpage open that you want to save to your account.

Social bookmarking can be used as a knowledge management system for individual and powerful social remendation research and annotation tool that is searchable, shareable, and accessible from any computer.Now you can join in the sharing and discovery of the web's best and lastet buzz. I promise your web browsing experience will never be the same.


ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
1) Video: For a great 8 min long tutorial on all the basics to get you started with delicious social bookmarking service watch- Getting Started with Del.icio.us Social Bookmarking
2) Blog: For additional information read- Social Bookmarking Services And Tools: The Wisdom Of Crowds That Organizes The Web
3) Wiki: Check out this wiki organized by an educator- Social Bookmarking Tools
4) Links: Now that you understand how social bookmarking works browse through this tagroll, a collection of websites with the same tag shared publicly, "bookmarking" tag in the delicious to see the lastest buzz on this topic in the social bookmarking community.
5) Comment: Participate in the discussion.