What Is Social Bookmarking?

The oblong button at the end of each blog post and other web pages around the Chinwag site links to a nifty service that allows you do two things:

 •  click on the left side of the button to subscribe to content updates via web-based feed readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Still unclear? See our webpage What is RSS?

 •  click on the right side of the button to add that webpage to whatever social bookmarking service you use

Social bookmarking in a nutshell

Social bookmarking services (such as del.icio.us, magnolia and stumbleupon) allow you to save webpages for reference, much like the 'Favourites' service in browsers like Explorer and Firefox, but they do much more than that.

They allow you to tag pages when you store their web addresses, and you can use multiple tags (and add / change them later). As many web pages may have more than one reference point - or relate to more than one topic - you can search the tags later to find relevant webpages you have bookmarked in a much more flexible and user-friendly fashion.

Faster & smarter discovery

The "social" part comes in due to the fact that you can view others' bookmarks on these sites and search their tags - a very valuable service. You can also comment on your bookmarks, follow other people, add them to your network to see what pages they are saving, and see who follows you.

It's a great way to mine information on topics without wading through the frequently useless or irrelevant results served up by the search engines.

These social bookmarking sites do various other useful things too, but we'll leave that up to you to discover... All you need to know right now is that social bookmarking makes the web work better!

Bonus video!

Check out this great video on social bookmarking from Lee LeFever at Commoncraft:
http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english (2007)