How to Use Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks with your friends, as well as label your bookmarks to help you remember why you saved a certain site. Social bookmarking also makes it easier to organize your bookmarks, which is necessary for the typical web user with hundreds of them.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Create an account on a social bookmarking website. The most popular of such sites is del.icio.us (see Resources below). Most sites will require your email address and name in order to create an account.

2. Select a username. Most social bookmarking sites will provide you with a unique webpage for your bookmarks, and will use your username to create such a page. Del.icio.us, for instance, would give you the page "http://del.icio.us/username."

3. Download the plugin your social bookmarking website uses to update your account. This plugin is usually a link that you add to your web browser's toolbar by dragging and dropping it in place and should not need further installation.

4. Add bookmarks by clicking the link you added to your toolbar. A new window will pop up with information about your new bookmark, allowing you to add tags, or keywords, that describe the link and why you bookmarked it.

5. Access your saved bookmarks by visiting your page on your social bookmarking website. Click on the name of the bookmark you wish to return to, and you'll be sent to that website.

6. Invite your friends to create accounts on the social bookmarking site that you use, in order to see what your friends are also bookmarking. You can send bookmarks to your friends once they have usernames on your site.

7. Tag your bookmarks with other usernames in order to share them with your friends. Some social bookmarking sites require you to use a specific format for the tag, such as "for:username" to make sure other users see shared bookmarks.

8. Subscribe to certain tags in order to see what other people have bookmarked. You can also subscribe to your friends' bookmarks.

Tips & Warnings

• You can access your social bookmarks from any computer with Internet access, because they are no longer saved only on your computer.
• On some social bookmarking sites, you can mark some or all of your bookmarks as private and prevent other people from looking at them.
• There are some social bookmarking sites that encourage users to share bookmarks on certain subjects. For example, some sites are focused on business bookmarks while others may focus on design.

Resources

• Bookmark sites on del.icio.us