Keep track of interesting links. Organise bookmarks with 'tags', and share your bookmarks with others. Browse other people's shared links on topics of interest.

Complexity: 1/5

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

(From Wikipedia - 1st January 2010)

1. Organize your collection of web-links
2. Share useful web-links within your team
3. Publish organized lists of resources for outside partners and clients
4. Keep up with the latest news, online resources and information in your sector
5. Discover websites, online resources, organisations and individuals in your area of interest

• Visit http://delicious.com
• Follow the »get started« link to sign-up and create an account
• Download the browser buttons (Or, if you get a security error trying that, look in the help section for ‘bookmarklet buttons for any browser’ and follow the instructions to manually install these.)

• Next time you come across a website you want to remember, click the or button.
• Enter a description of the website you are now bookmarking
• Enter key words as ‘tags’

• Go to http://delicious.com and select ‘your bookmarks’
• Explore the ‘tags’ links on the right to filter and display different groups of your bookmarks.

1) Keep track of new bookmarks on a particular topic by anyone (on the whole of del.icio.us) by tracking a particular tag. Visit: http://delicious.com/tag/your_tag_here. For example, http://delicious.com/tag/youthwork. Look for the icon at the very bottom of the page, and subscribe to this RSS feed. Every time a new bookmark is added with this tag, you will see it in your RSS reader.

2) Share information with your colleagues by agreeing on a unique ‘tag’ you will use on information you want others in your team to see. (For example I might use ‘youthsocialmedia’ to share news about youth engagement and social media). Then each subscribe to the RSS feed for this tag (see #1) so that you will each see whenever a member of the team tags a new bookmark with this unique tag.