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Browsers have always had a bookmarking or “favorites” features. Problem is, when you start to get too many bookmarks they become ineffective. The more you have the harder it is to keep them organized. It’s also hard to remember which bookmarks are which. Online social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us simply move your bookmarking activity to the web instead of locking them into your browser. But this simple shift brings many benefits.
One basic but helpful feature of online bookmarking is adding descriptions to each bookmark. Descriptions help you to recall, weeks or months after bookmarking, why you bookmarked the page in the first place. Another basic but helpful feature is tagging. Tags are usually single words used to catalog bookmarks in relationship to either the nature of the content or your purpose for bookmarking it. For example, if I were to bookmark a page about digital marketing I might tag it “digitalmarketing,” “onlineadvertising,” and just “advertising” because that’s what the page is about. But I also might tag the page “agencycritique” or “websmart” because I want to associate that page with an intention I have to use it in my own way. Tagging is a very flexible, personal, way of organizing lot’s of content.
Online social bookmarks are of course available online, and so you can always access your bookmarks from anywhere you can get access to the Internet. But there are more advantages to social bookmarking.
Because online bookmarking sites like del.icio.us have lots of users, your tags are aggregated with everyone else’s creating a new kind of context for bookmarks. Not only can you see how you tagged a particular page, but you can see how others tagged it too. Seeing how others have tagged pages gives you insight into how that content relates to similar pages. This provides new insight into the content. Social tagging lead to interesting discoveries too. Tags are also links, so you can easily navigate from a specific page tagged “advertising” to all other pages tagged “advertising” by the community. Also, seeing the total number of times a page has been bookmarked by all users gives you insight into how popular a page or site may be compared to others tagged with similar words.
A case in point. I’m using Wufoo for this site’s contact forms. I’ve been tacking web applications for a long time, and whenever I’ve come across one that provides form building functionality I tag it “forms.” When I need this service I went to my tags and saw that Wufoo was tagged by many more poeple on del.icio.us than my other sites I’d tagged “forms.” I went there first and ended up using their service.
Finally, online social bookmarking is an incredibly powerful way to share content, spread information, leverage your company’s expertise, and extend the content you create. By embedding your tags (or just certain tags) on pages with related content you can add extra information on your subject by simply tagging content. Like this, to the left are my del.icio.us tags marked “tagging.”
I also use my del.icio.us tags in the right column for anything of general interest to AgencyCritique visitors.
Combining RSS and social bookmarking is a powerful combination to managing all the critical information that we need to know, and have it all available to us and our organizations when we need it most. These tools are essential in today’s business and marketing world. If you’re still not sure about all this, or feel overwhelmed, you might want to think about hiring me.
For more information about tagging and del.icio.us see my Web Smart newsletter Tags to the World.
