Social Bookmarking: Anytime/Anyplace Access to Your Bookmarks

Social bookmarking is the posting of what have traditionally been called bookmarks/favorites in a browser (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari) to a list which is accessed via a web site (Delicious, Diigo).  Hence, bookmarks can be accessed anytime/anyplace on any device on which you have internet access.  Users can decide to keep bookmarks private or share them publicly.  The value in sharing them publicly is that topic lists can easily be shared with a group of colleagues or students.  For example, I can easily access all of my bookmarked sites about 1:1 technology and share this list by directing others to: https://www.diigo.com/user/infoaim/1:1. The beauty of this is that the list is dynamic in that as I tag bookmarks 1:1 they are added to this list and accessible immediately to others.

Bookmarks can be accompanied by a description, notes and tags.  Tags are labels created by a user and assigned to a bookmark (i.e. recipes).  Tag bundles can be created by tagging a group of tags (i.e. cooking which includes all sites tagged with: recipes, desserts, appetizers).  Adding descriptions and tags to bookmarks allows for greater  flexibility in organization (a bookmark can be tagged with multiple keywords), ultimately leading to a richer collection of bookmarks that can be searched in multiple ways.

Users can quickly and easily search their own bookmarks/favorites by using tags and can search others’ bookmarks/favorites by username and tag.  This allows users to copy relevant bookmarks/favorites and find a community of individuals interested in similar topics.  Users can subscribe to feeds for certain tags and join groups, having newly added links on a specific topic posted by other users automatically delivered to their inbox.  Social bookmarking sites include features such as “most popular” bookmarks/favorites which are updated daily, hourly in some cases, and browser plug-ins to make bookmarking seamless during a web browsing session.         

In a nutshell, the difference between how you have likely used bookmarks and social bookmarks are listed in the table below.

Traditional Bookmarks/Favorites	Social Bookmarks
If a site is relevant to several topic areas, you have to save the bookmark in multiple folders	Bookmarks are tagged and can be added to numerous categories (bundles) all at once
Bookmarks are saved locally on a machine and can only be accessed on that machine	Bookmarks are saved on the web and can be accessed anytime, anyplace you have an internet connection
In order to share the bookmarks, you need to create a hotlist or web page	Bookmarks are public information and can be shared with anyone by giving them the URL
Searching for a saved bookmark can be time consuming	Search capabilities are built in allowing searches by tags and bundles
	Ability to link to others’ collections of resources on the same topic as well as search topics

This CommonCraft video offers a great explanation of what social bookmarks are and how a social bookmarking tool works.

My preferred social bookmark tool is Diigo.  Not only does it have all of the aforementioned features, but users can annotate web sites by highlighting content, creating sticky notes and grabbing screen captures.  This is valuable in helping users remember why a site is bookmarked as well as pointing others to the significance of a bookmarked site.  If you want give social bookmarks a try, check out the upcoming Technology Tuesday or shoot me an email and I can help get you started in 15 minutes!