Bookmarks for the Digital World
by Rachael Schendel
The digital world is always changing and social media is no different. Some marketers are spending upwards of 20 hours a week on social networking alone. Of these social sites, Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most popular, in that order. But what is on the horizon for social media? Enter social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking allows internet users to store, organize, search and manage their bookmarks of web pages with the help of tags (much like you might tag a photo in flickr or Facebook or a video in YouTube). This concept dates back to 1996, but gained popularity in 2003, when Del.icio.us hit the scene.
The perks of social bookmarking are many:
• Access your bookmarks from anywhere. For example: If you’ve bookmarked something on your work computer, you can pull it up at home with ease (or from anywhere for that matter) just by logging into your account on http://delicious.com.
• Share bookmarks and get bookmarks in return. You can find people with similar interests and view their bookmarks, or share with coworkers, etc. Of course, anyone who knows your screen name can see your bookmarks, so there is an option to make some private if you’d like.
• Search popular tags. An alternative to doing a Google search, you can search del.icio.us for popular tags, like “social media,” and choose from a multitude of sites (126,492 to be exact) that people have bookmarked. The best management of bookmarks is to give each site multiple tags. And not only can you search tags, but you can subscribe to them as well. So, the next time someone tags “social media” for a bookmark, you’ll know about it.
• Your network. This can include friends, coworkers, people whom you’ve never met, but have similar interests with. If you’d like to join my network, add rasideas!
Del.icio.us makes it easy to bookmark by giving you a quick link on your toolbar, just click and tag and you’re done.
Happy bookmarking!


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Posted at 6:15 pm on October 22nd, 2009