I think it would be impossible to get through all of my daily reads without using both my RSS reader and my social bookmarks. You’ve heard me discuss why you should use RSS feeds before, but have you heard of social bookmarking? The following is an incredibly well done introduction to social bookmarking from CommonCraft.com. Watch it before moving on.

A Video Intro to Social Bookmarking (3:25)

The Advantages of Social Bookmarking

So now you know that social bookmarking simply means that you store your bookmarks on a web site rather than in your browser.

The one disadvantage to this is that anyone and everyone can see what you bookmark. Social bookmarks are not for things that you want to keep private (i.e. bookmarks to financial institutions, etc.) Social bookmarks are only for those links that you want to share.

I know that it still might sound a little crazy, but remember, there are several advantages to social bookmarks.

1. They’re more efficient: With normal browser bookmarking, the best you can do to organize your bookmarks is to split them into folders. That’s a start, but what if you want to bookmark a video of Gerald Ford falling down? That bookmark could go under either the “funny”, “video”, or “political” folder. Because you can only put it in one, it may be difficult to find when you’re looking for it in a couple of months. With Social bookmarking, you can add multiple key words to your bookmarks (called “tagging”), which allows them to be sorted in several ways. In essence, it’s like putting your Gerald Ford bookmark into the “funny”, “video”, and “political” folders instead of being forced to choose just one.
2. They’re more flexible: You’re no longer tied to a single PC to access sites that you’ve bookmarked. With social bookmarking you can access your bookmarks whether you’re at home, the library, a friend’s house, or Crazy Uncle Larry’s, as long as there is a PC with an internet connection.
3. They save anxiety: Ever not e-mail someone a link because you’d rather not bother them with something that’s on the periphery of what they’re interested in? By sharing all your bookmarks, there’s no more worrying about what people are going to like and not like. You bookmark what you want and give your friends the link to your social bookmarks page so that they can filter out what they like from it. In essence you give them more things to look at without peppering them with unnecessary e-mails.
4. They save time: If the endless stream of joke e-mails from Uncle Larry are clogging your inbox, you can eliminate the time spent scrolling through the pages and pages of forwards to get to the “really funny” link by getting Uncle Larry into social bookmarking. He posts all his “really funny” links to his social bookmarks page, you go in and check one page once a week, and the e-mail stream dries up. You save time, aggravation, and you no longer want to choke him out.

Get Started!

If you’re ready to try it out, then sign up for your free del.icio.us account (I don’t think they even require an e-mail). If after you sign up you want to see some of the funny or useful stuff that I just can’t seem to jam into my posts, Add me to your del.icio.us network.

Then, forward this to your elders and drag them into the 21st century.

Posted in Geeky, Video