Social bookmarking is a way of sharing your favourite sites and pages on the internet with other people. It is a great way of finding new content as well. If you’ve never come across a social bookmarking site before, it is a bit like sharing your bookmarks with everyone and being able to search your friends’ bookmarks.
Below is a selection of the most popular social bookmarking sites
Delicious allows you to share your personal bookmarks with other users. You can organise and tag your bookmarks, making it easier for people to search through. It also makes it easier for you to find information amongst your own bookmarks. The actual site lists the hottest links, the one’s that are bookmarked by the most people, and the newest links. It is a great way to find new information, adding a new dimension to old school bookmarking and RSS feeds.
Stumble Upon takes social bookmarking to another level, where it is about purely sharing and finding information. The site itself describes it as channel surfing. Stumble gives you sites based upon a list of categories you select. You simply click a button and it gives you a site, click again and another comes up. It is literally stumbling through the internet. You can then rate each site by clicking the thumbs up ‘I like it!’ or thumbs down if you disapprove.
Digg was once the most influential aggregator of news on the net. Users submit and rate links by ‘Digging’ them, clicking on a button with a thumbs up sign on it (a little like Stumble Upon). You can also make friends on the site, shouting out your favourite links and asking them to Digg those. The popularity of Digg has made it more difficult to find great content, especially since the content is controlled by a few super users. This has made the site less diverse.
Reddit is a cross between Delicious and Digg. For many people it has replaced Digg as a more diverse source of articles and information. Users rate articles in much the same way as Digg, and can also comment on each link. This gives it a community feel with better and more intelligent discussion – if that’s what you’re looking for!
