Social Bookmarking

When pondering social bookmarking, think MySpace but with a purpose for monitoring more than your friend's Saturday evening out on the town.

At its basic level, social bookmarking is a way to save your bookmarks (normally saved to Window's Internet Explorer) online, which means that you can access them anywhere you have internet access. Just think about the applications that come from having access to your favorite websites whenever you want. No longer do you have to remember websites off the top of your head.

At the intermediate level, you can beging to organize your bookmarks. While you can create folders in Explorer, "tagging" (the official Web 2.0 organizing term) is 10 times better. It allows you to cross-file websites that you might use for multiple purposes. In the Web 2.0 world, content can instantly become overwhelming and organizing that information is key. However, listing websites by author's last name isn't going to serve you well. Tagging is considered a folksonomy (folk - created by the people), which means that you can tag (organize) your content in whatever way makes sense to you.

For example, if you were researching how to grow tomatoes in Colorado, you might use the tags "garden", "Colorado", "tomato", or "black thumb". The point is you can use whatever makes sense to you.

At the advanced level, your bookmarks link you to others on the web. With a simple click, you can suddenly see all of the bookmarks another person has saved to their del.icio.us account. You're learning and accessing more content with every click.

Tag your it - Tina Barber's Del.icio.us account:
http://del.icio.us/tinabarber