So what is Social Bookmarking all about?

It’s social everything these days! Social networking and now social bookmarking and in today’s article I will explain how you can utilise social bookmarking to enhance your web browsing experience.  We have all heard of “Internet favourites” or “Internet bookmarks”?  These are the pages that one saves when they would like to refer to it at a later date, and all Internet browsers in the market including our beloved Internet Explorer and others such as FireFox and Chrome all allow you to save links or shortcuts to your favourite web pages so that you can easily access them.

Social Bookmarking takes this process one step further and breaks all barriers and shortcoming associated with using local favourites.  Here are some of the caveats to Internet bookmarking via the “legacy browser method”

• Bookmarks saved in your preferred browser are local to that computer/browser.  If you operate on multiple computers on a daily basis, accessing Internet favourites stored on another machine is problematic.
• Bookmarks cannot be easily shared between your peers.  This is where social bookmarking really comes into play allowing you to easily share your internet favourites in the same way that the world wide web and in particular web 2.0 has allowed us to easily share photos, videos, blog posts and other meda quite easily.
• Most browsers including Internet Explorer restricts you to organising your Internet favourites in folders or categories.   Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags allowing to apply multiple tags to a single web page that has been added as a favourite.

There are a number of Social Bookmarking services including Delicious, Digg and Stumble Upon, with today’s focus on my favourite being Delicious.

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks and pioneered the use of tags.

As an example, my Delicious account which is publicly shared (you can also set it to private) can be accessed via http://delicious.com/georgekhalil

You will notice that most of favourites would commonly have a number of tags against it which makes it a lot easier to search for and locate at a later date.

So what are you waiting for?  Sign up for a delicious account at no cost and begin saving your bookmarks to the “cloud”.  This will make your bookmarks available anywhere at any time.  Once you have your friends on board, you can subscribe to each other’s bookmarks promoting bookmark sharing.

You can signup for a new account here.

Happy bookmarking