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By Kimmy Powell

Sunday, Mar. 18, 2007

Imagine finding that neat do-it-yourself web page you’ve been aching to share with all your buddies.   You first bookmark the page within your browser; then you copy and paste the reference into an email and send it to friends.   Every time you find something while web surfing, you’re back to the repetition of saving,
copying and pasting the URL in an email it to friends. 

Today, there’s a better way to collect, store, find, and share web bookmarks without the email repetition.  The concept is called social bookmarking, and it’s the hottest wave of networking to hit the Net.   Social bookmarking services work in much the same way as MySpace or Friendster, but you instead create and catalog bookmarks to share with friends and other users.  

Social bookmarking has hovered around the periphery of cyberspace for the last ten years.  These community networks began with itList.com back in 1996, but never really found a niche in the failing dot com market at the beginning of the 21st century.  Low profit margins did not help either.   Social bookmarking services went underground until its recent resurgence with the popularity of Furl, del.icio.us and Digg.com.

There are no mysterious tricks to master, no special shortcuts to remember; social bookmarking web services work pretty much like the bookmarking you do on your personal computer.  You save the location of a web page on your computer’s hard drive when you bookmark it using Firefox’s “Bookmark This Page” or Internet Explorer’s “Add to Favorites”.  With online social bookmarks, rather than storing the page on your hard drive, you store them on a publicly- accessible Internet site.  You classify, organize and manage your bookmarks on the public site just as you would in the browser and assign descriptive names, or keyword tags, to reference the saved pages that describe the contents of the page to the community.

Getting started is fairly easy and straightforward.  Registration is mostly free; all that is needed is to register your name, date of birth (some sites) and to provide a valid email address (to confirm and activate your account).   Once you’ve completed registration, take a tour of the site’s features before digging in with lists.  Many services offer “bookmarklet” downloads to facilitate bookmarking.  Bookmarklets are JavaScript software programs that add buttons to the browser’s toolbar and facilitate the posting of web pages to bookmarking sites.   Some services (like del.icio.us) offer tools to import existing bookmarks stored on your hard drive onto their systems.   If you decide to go this route, remember to clean out dead links or junk before the import; otherwise, you face the troublesome battle of deleting unwanted links one by one.   Other features may include video and podcasting (Digg.com and YouTube), ranking capabilities, ratings and commentaries, RSS feeds, the ability to annotate links and automatically update links.  Exploring the web site will reveal much about the inner workings of these services.

Once you’ve explored the available features, you are ready to set up a profile and import or create your personal web links.   You can use your profile to manage users (others who have registered on the service), decide whether to save bookmarks publicly or privately, create, change or delete keyword tags and set privacy filters for bookmarking and blogging. 

There are no conventions or set rules to creating keywords – you decide how bookmarks should be classified, stored and shared.   You have the option of preserving the suggested keywords as you import your bookmarks (not offered on all sites), or the option to create new bookmarks.  To find bookmarks available from others, initiate a search by subject or by using keywords.  A list of qualifying sites (ranked by the services using the keywords other community users have assigned these links or the link’s popularity) will be returned, of which subscribing is simply a click away with the bookmarklet.  For each site listed, you can click and find other users who have bookmarked the link and who may share similar interests.  

Social bookmarking creates a community of users whose pooled Internet resources has led to the creation of a “folksonomy.”  A folksonomy is the vocabulary and structure that subscribers use to define these Internet resources.

Now that you’ve seen how these services work, it’s time to examine what’s hot in the bookmarking community.  We discuss specific implementations of these services below.

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/)
By the time Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in the fall of 2006, it had registered over one million users (and over 50 million posts).  This is by far the most popular of the social bookmarking services, due in part to its of usability and wealth of features (including RSS feeds, podcasting, friends list, browser plug-ins, import/export bookmarks, popular, and recent lists).

Digg.com(http://digg.com/)
Finding a niche with geeks and technophiles, Digg.com has become equally alluring to mainstream users because of the colorful commentaries subscribers leave about bookmarked sites.  Subscribers submit news stories and web pages for consideration by other subscribers.  The most popular
sites are promoted on the Digg’s front page.  Among some of its features are news, videos and podcasts.

Furl(www.furl.net)
Furl is distinguished from the other bookmarking services by its ability to save searchable copies of any web page into personal archives.  Furl provides import and export functionalities to Internet Explorer, Firefox and del.icio.us and supports a number of citation formats.  However, Furl lacks the ability to use suggestive keyword tags.

Simpy(www.simpy.com)  
One of the oldest and last remaining privately-operated bookmarking services also provides powerful search capabilities.  Subscribers can save,
tag and search bookmarks and notes
or browse other subscriber’s links
and tags.

Reddit(www.reddit.com)  
Reddit users can post and tag links to content that network users rate.  Links are grouped by popularity on lists or relegated to virtual non-existence.  This particular service seems geared for geeky and scientific types (after all, it’s programmed in Python and Lisp).

StumbleUpon(www.stumbleupon.com) 
StumbleUpon lacks some of the niftier features del.icio.us and Furl has to offer, but it makes up for it in raves from PC World and the Wall Street Journal.  Features include ratings and friends, popular and recent lists and browser plug-ins.  Once you stumble upon this user-ranked service though, it’s a keeper. 

YouTube (www.youtube.com)
This wildly popular video-sharing site uses Adobe Flash technology to display blogs, TV clips and music videos.  You can rank, watch and share videos, and interact with other members of the community. 

The Final Word on Social Bookmarking Service

The key advantage in using social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us and Furl lies in its abilities to point users in the direction of valuable Internet resources rather than wading through a list of useful and not so useful information generated by Googling. 
By placing an emphasis on the user, it has created a human-centric classification system that better defines how others perceive a given resource.  The advantage of a human-centric focus is also its downside – there are no standards when concepts have different meanings for different people, leaving links open to wide interpretation.  This same flaw also provides numerous opportunities for spammers to flood the free and easy services with ads to enhance visibility of their websites.  As the bookmarking services continue to evolve, advances in security and privacy will attempt to discourage such activity.

Social bookmarking sites are a wonderful way to store and share bookmarks on the web without having to resort to an individual effort of saving and re-saving changing web pages.  With “anytime/everywhere” accessibility, getting to know somebody and seeing what he or she likes…it’s the new way to meet friends and influence millions of people.

On a more serious note:

If you go to the website LetsSayThanks.com you can pick out a thank you card that Xerox will print and send to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq. You can't choose who gets it, but it will go to a member of the U.S. armed services. How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!