What with all the coverage that social networking has been getting in the media, social bookmarking hasn’t gotten a fair shake at the limelight. Social bookmarking is somewhat like adding a website to your list of favorites; except your list of favorites can become very long and unmanageable. To mediate this you can create a system of folders and organize your favorites according to groupings that make sense to you. What always happened to me is that the groupings I created made perfect sense, unless I need to find a site three months later and I can’t remember if the website for that hotel in Killington is in the Snow folder, the Travel folder, or the I Wish folder.
Social bookmaking has enabled me to fare better at managing my site of interest. I use Del.icio.us although there are lots of sites out there; Blue Dot, Simpy, and FURL just to name a few. Since I am a Del.icio.us user I will use that site to discuss social bookmarking.
Once you register I suggest installing the small and unobtrusive application that puts a del.icio.us button in your browser. Now, let’s say that you find a website that you want to come back to. You click your delicious button and tag the site. The tag is essentially a key word or a series of key words that will group this site with other sites that you have tagged with the same word or words.
My friends are going to the snowboarding world cup in Quebec in March of 2008 and want me to come. I tell them I am going to look into it; after all there are a lot of factors to weigh here. So I start by cruising over to the U.S. Snowboarding Team website and navigate to the events page. The exact date is posted here and since I don’t want to forget, I tag this as “snowboarding world cup.” The world cup will be held in Stoneham so next I go to the Stoneham resort page because while I’m okay with being a spectator, I’m still going to want to thrash while I’m out there, so I need to know what runs the public will have access to during the competition and how much lift tickets are. I tag this page “snowboarding world cup Stoneham.” And as I continue my research for airfare, vehicle rentals, lodging, maps, locations of grocery stores (because if you have been to a resort town you know you can’t eat there for less than $25 a day), and all sorts of other information. Each page gets tagged “snowboarding world cup” and then another keyword.
A different set of friends is encouraging me to visit them in British Columbia this winter and get some serious crazyness on at Whistler. So I do a lot of the same sort of research: airfare, lift tickets, and mountain maps being the big three priorities for me here. These all get tagged “Whistler 2008” and some other descriptive keyword. The different airfare options get tagged “Whistler 2008 air” for example.
Even though the trips both involve the same subject matter; snowboarding, travel, and fun fun fun, since I have given them distinctive tags, I can easily keep the information separate and extremely easy to access.
What I have described above is just one step up from the antiquated favorites system. What really sets social bookmarking apart is the social aspect. I can click on any of the key words I have selected and a new page will load; this one displaying all the other pages that del.icio.us users have tagged using the same keyword. All of the sudden I realize that the hotel I was looking at was cheap, but someone else found a hotel in Stoneham that is packaged with lift tickets, which is almost always a better deal. Plus I find a great site that provides a behind the scenes look at what the world cup will entail and what sponsors will be there, it even speculates on what freebies will be given away. Yay free Spy goggles!
Both these sites came from the same user so I click on the user’s name and a new page loads with a list of all the pages that this user has tagged. This user has tagged different snow resorts all across North America and has links to somewhat esoteric pages where some resourceful shredder has layed out good runs over a topographic maps for different national forests. This equates to free back country snowboarding, which also means no lifts = lots of hiking. But the page has a link that lists back country outfitters in close proximity to the forests that rent snowshoes and snowmobiles.
This is the good stuff! This is also information it would have taken me forever, if ever, to find just doing random searches on Google. Every niche and interest is represented, and just like snowflakes no person tags the same pages. So get other there little snowflake and find whatever information you need to enhance your life.
If that extremely optimistic paragraph didn’t convince you, check out del.icio.us’ own blog at http://blog.delicious.com/ which has a video that illustrates the wonderfulness of social bookmarking.
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