What is social bookmarking?

If you use a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, you may be used to storing web sites you want to visit again as "bookmarks" or "favorites". You may also have discovered the limitations of your browser's system for storing bookmarks: You may have a lot of different folders that take a long time to search. Or a hard time figuring out whether that web site about fundraising in a crisis belongs in the folder named "fundraising" or the folder named "crisis management". Or maybe it's just really irritating that your home computer doesn't let you access the bookmarks you stored on your computer at work.

Social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us, Furl or ma.gnolia) solve all these problems. They store your bookmarks online, so they're accessible from any Internet-connected computer (and you probably don't need to access your bookmarks at times when you're not connected to the Internet). They store your bookmarks with tags, rather than folders, so you can assign a single bookmark to multiple categories. And a lot of these services offer nifty ways of organizing or viewing your tags -- like tag clouds -- so you can quickly find the bookmark you're looking for.

But the term social bookmarking probably tipped you off that there are some collaborative benefits here, too. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.

For example, if you use the del.icio.us service to store bookmarks about foundations, you can keep track of all the bookmarks that other people are storing under foundations, too -- making it a great tool for keeping on top of grantmaking opportunities (and also basement construction -- one of the downsides of tagging is that different people use the same tag to mean different things!)  And if you store a lot of resources under speechwriting, you may notice other users who store stuff under speechwriting, too -- a great way of finding and contacting other people who share your particular interests.

But the best way to find out how social bookmarking can work for you is to dive right in and try it out for yourself.