Social Bookmarking - what's it all about?

If you like this website and you want to save its address for future reference you can do so by bookmarking it.

When you create a bookmark using your browser's bookmark facility the website's details are stored in a folder on your computer. Because of this your browser's bookmarks are only accessible by you whenever you use that computer.

By contrast, when you create a bookmark using a social bookmarking site the bookmark is stored on the internet, allowing you to share these links both with friends and people with similar interests and access your links from any internet-connected computer. In addition to this, you can also tag your bookmarks with relevant keywords so that they can be found by people searching for information by keyword.

The power behind the popularity of social bookmarking comes from the fact that all the content is hand-picked and tagged by humans. As humans understand the content that they are bookmarking and tagging far better than any computer algorithm ever could social bookmarking sites can often throw up some very useful search results that are hard to find using traditional computer-maintained search engines.

All of the social bookmarking sites listed here are free to use but they do require you to register. Once you have registered you can bookmark this site simply by clicking on the relevant link in the menu on the left and logging into your social bookmarking site account. Don't forget to include a set of useful tags to help others find the website via a keyword search and attach a commentary of your own so that you can tell others how useful this site really is.

You can find out more about social bookmarking on Wikipedia.