What is Social Bookmarking?

Recently, a reader asked, “What is del.icio.us?” Well, at the risk of undoubtedly plagiarizing what’s already published about del.icio.us, it is a collection of everyone’s favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews and more. It is an example of social bookmarking where your favorites can be shared with friends, family, colleagues or virtually anyone with Internet access. Now, you can store private bookmark collections, but this eludes the point. Del.icio.us is all about sharing and discovering. Del.icio.us provides easy access to most recent and most popular bookmarks and incorporates the concept of ‘tagging’ articles with keywords for enhanced searchability. And once you have discover that someone else that likes peanut butter and bologna sandwiches, you will want to join their network and subscribe to their del.icio.us RSS feed.

“What is Digg?,” you ask. Same concept, but on Digg every article has been submitted and voted on by the community. Here, you can share information which is important to you. The more your articles are appreciated (based on the voting) the higher your article is promoted until your PB&B sandwich article eventually demands a spot on the Digg home page.

This article would not be complete without calling attention to the del.icio.us domain name. Though it could be considered clever and it is undisputedly marketable (Yahoo! bought del.icio.us in 2005), I find the name obnoxious and irritating. It is known as a domain hack and I find this particular hack to be unbelievably difficult to type into my browser address bar correctly on first attempt. Perhaps, this is my short coming. I guess I should be thankful for local bookmarks.