Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Users can access their bookmarks from any computer.

Why not the standard bookmarks on your browser?

Some bookmarks on browsers are available only on that particular machine you created them on. Other browsers (Firefox/Chrome/Safari) allow you to use your bookmarks from another machine but same browser. So to make sure that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere and any browsers you can look at the below booking marking services.

Why “Social”

When you bookmark a site you can set it is private (accessible only to you) or public (access to anybody using that bookmarking site). Your bookmarks can then be shared with friends, followers in different social medium like Facebook, Twitter etc (depending on your settings). Social bookmarking websites are great way to find out what the Internet likes at the moment.

More business

Social bookmarking sites are more often visited by search engines as a means of finding out either new or popular sites to record in their database. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they get saved, shared, and tagged by other users. It also helps to promote your sites by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with each other. Social bookmarking also play an important role in SEO – helping more visits to your sites.

Get started

Most of the sites are free, but you need to register. Once you register, you could upload you contacts and then follow them. This will help you understand what they have bookmarked and will give you samples for future reference. You can join their specific groups based on your needs, this will help you find good reference sites. Once you get an idea of what others are doing, you can slowly grow up to a level of an advanced social book marker. As you start using these sites, you will end up mostly with at least two stacks of your bookmark – one which is private (for your use only – available anywhere/anytime) and other which you share with friends/groups.

Note : Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr are also social bookmarking sites. The below listed are dedicated bookmarking sites – so you get much more features.

List of popular Bookmarking sites

Delicious

Delicious allows you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that you can see the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, the search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find interesting new bookmarks from people like you. Once you have bookmarked at least 5 links, you can build a “Stack”. Each stack is given a name and a group, and once a stack gets published, it is both shared with others and followed.

Additional Help :How to use delicious social bookmarking”

Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web. As compared to other it has an informal feel. Users give all the content and decide, through voting, what’s good and what’s not. Links that receive community approval bubble up towards number one, so the front page is constantly in motion and filled with fresh, interesting links. Users send content in the form of either a link or a text (“self”) post. Links and content can be voted on to move it up the list. Reddit specializes in hosting conversations about content.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon collate ratings from its users to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded users have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine. Designed to bookmark web pages and highlight key points for reference. is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users.

Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg reveals the best content as voted by its users. Drawback of this site – The tops ranked links also show sponsored links, creditably of the rating is lost.

What do I use : I use delicious for storing my bookmarks and StumbleUpon for discovering sites.

Remember – When you find a good site, don’t forget to bookmark it for future and if it’s worth sharing .. don’t forget to share with your network.