The 5 Most Popular and Effective Social Bookmarking Sites

The 5 Most Popular and Effective Social Bookmarking Sites

1. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that has rapidly taken off even more in popularity since being purchased by Yahoo. del.icio.us is probably the most used out of all these top picks, particularly to post interesting sites that have been found around the Web. You can also subscribe to quite a few del.icio.us tags, such as popular and reference, and all the sites tagged with these keywords in a RSS reader of choice, Bloglines.

2. Digg is social bookmarking and social networking gone a little crazy due to the fact that anyone can submit a Digg (site), and then anyone can comment on those same Diggs. The most interesting feature of Digg has to actually be the comments on the sites and stories, since the Digg community is not shy about letting folks know how they feel about a particular Digg. Primarily focussed on geeky, technology-type items.

3. Reddit is a social bookmarking Web site that works much like Furl and del.icio.us: you register a username and password, and then start submitting and sharing your bookmarks. Reddit is similar to del.icio.us in that users are encouraged to vote on the links and stories that they feel are deserving of being in the top dog spot: it’s kind of a popularity contest, so to speak.

4. Furl gives users the ability to save copies of any Web page, search within your own personal archive of Web pages, and share what you find. People use Furl to create their own personal shopping lists, real estate directories, job searches, student research papers, etc. This may just sound like a fancy way of saying bookmarks; but the thing about Furl is that you can access it from any computer, which means that your Favorites will go with you.

5. The beauty of StumbleUpon, : you are able to take advantage of a vast network of dedicated Web searchers who are finding utterly brilliant sites and sharing them with you. StumbleUpon is an incredibly addicting way to search the Web. People have found themselves up till 1:30 AM blearily clicking the Stumble! Button over and over again, because the quality of the sites are just so amazing; you just keep on coming across stuff that instantly merits a bookmark of your own.

The 7 things you should now about Social Bookmarking

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

This site specifically breaks down the many aspects and variables related to social bookmarking.

This journal also gives two really good scenarios regarding a professional who doesn't have social bookmarking vs. a professional who does. It goes into detail the differences of how they conduct buisness with and without using social boomarking tools.

Some questions this article answers are:

• What is social bookmarking?
• What types of people utilize social bookmarking (students, professionals etc.)?
• How does social bookmarking work?
• What are the advantages?
• What are the disadvantages?
• What are the implications it has on teaching and learning?

What Can Social Bookmarking Do For Me?

Not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to your friends, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Most social bookmarking sites allow you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like shopping, technology, politics, blogging, news, sports, etc.

How Can I Benefit From Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking and social news allow you to specifically target what you want to see. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something in, and then searching for that needle in a haystack, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for.

http://webtrends.about.com/od/socialbookmarking101/p/aboutsocialtags.htm

Intro/Basic Definition of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking