27 Oct, 2009
What is social bookmarking and why should I care?
Social bookmarking has been around a while, but I talk to people all the time who have no idea what it is or why they should be taking advantage. If you’ve heard of sites like del.icio.us or diigo, then you’ve heard of social bookmarking. So what is social bookmarking?
At its most basic level, social bookmarking allows you to store, organize, and retrieve your bookmarks from any computer (or smartphone) that’s connected to the Internet. The social part comes in to play when you begin to share (and discover) bookmarks with the rest of the world through the use of tags. The nice folks at Common Craft have a fantastic video that explains social bookmarking in plain English:
A comparison of two social bookmarking sites: Delicious and Diigo
Now that you (hopefully) have a better idea what social bookmarking is all about, let’s look at two of the most popular social bookmarking sites: del.icio.us (or just Delicous) and diigo. Both offer similar functionality, but with a few differences. Which one you use is up to you.
Delicious
Delicious began life as del.icio.us in 2003 as one of the first social bookmarking sites and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Yahoo! officially changed the name to “Delicous,” but the old URL still works.
One of the main benefits of Delicious is that it’s used by a LOT of people. More people = more opportunities to discover good bookmarks. A look at the “Popular Bookmarks” section of Delicious as I’m writing this shows 315 bookmarks added in the last minute with the most popular bookmarks saved by over 100 people each, some approaching 200. By comparison, the “Hot Bookmarks” on Diigo have all been saved by less than 50 people.
In addition to the large user-base, Delicious benefits from being owned by Yahoo! This means there’s a good chance it’ll stick around. A couple years ago, a new social bookmarking site popped up that was supposed to blow Delicious out of the water. The site was ma.gnolia. In January of 2009, ma.gnolia suffered a major server crash and all user data was lost. Ma.gnolia then went offline only to re-appear in a limited beta as gnolia.com. (Both Delicious and diigo have the ability to back up your bookmarks to your computer, so if catastrophe strikes you’ll at least have your bookmarks up until the last time you backed up.)
diigo
Diigo came onto the scene in July of 2006 and offered a host of new features to differentiate itself from Delicious and other social bookmarking sites. In addition to bookmarking, diigo allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and annotate the page with sticky notes. These highlights and sticky notes can be private or shared within a diigo group. In theory this is a great feature, but in practice its usefulness is still up in the air.
The second major new feature of diigo is the ability to take a snapshot of a page. Have you ever saved a bookmark only to go back later and find the page no longer exists? With the snapshot feature of diigo, you can take a snapshot of the page as it was when you bookmarked it, and pull it up in the future even if the page is no longer available. This is a very useful feature, but you have to remember to save a snapshot or it can’t help you.
Why should you care?
If you use social bookmarking for nothing more than organizing your own bookmarks you’ll still be way ahead of the game. The old way of saving bookmarks locally on every web browser you use, only to have the list grow to unusable and unorganized proportions, is over. With social bookmarking and tags you’ll be able to find any bookmark, no matter how old, very easily. Once you start taking advantage of the social aspects, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without social bookmarking.
Additional resources
Here are some additional resources to help you learn more about social bookmarking:
- Ultimate Guide to Social Bookmarking
- The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users
- Diigo tour (video)
- Diigo Tutorials
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