Quick and Dirty Social Media For Writers: Social Bookmarking

For Social Media Monday… bookmarking on the web just got better.

Okay, okay. It got better years ago. I’m just getting around to exploring its potential.

You know when you find something great online and you don’t want to lose it? You bookmark that site/URL in your browser, right? And that’s great, right?

Well, um. It could be better. A lot better. It could be social bookmarking.

Reasons Browser Bookmarking Is For the Dogs

• You use more than one computer or internet device (i.e. computer, tablet, smart phone) at home
• You want to access your home bookmarks at work or vice versa
• You frequently kill computers and therefore lose browser bookmarks
• You don’t know how to back up bookmarks or reinstate them after you change to a new computer/device
• It never occurs to you to actually look for your bookmarks in your browser
• Sharing bookmarks when saved in your browser is time consuming and difficult

Tell Me More About This Social Bookmarking Thing

Social bookmarking is website bookmarking tool that taps into the wisdom of crowds. That is, if you want it to.

At it’s most basic, sites like Delicious (used to be Del.icio.us and is still a free service), can be a place on the web to privately tack a few URLs you don’t want to lose.

At it’s most sophisticated, it can be a place where you tack URLs along with pictures, a synopsis, tags, titles, and notes, all organized into a topic ‘stack’ that you can ‘publish’ (which means share with other people on the web).

A Quick Rundown on The ‘Social’ Aspect

• You can see how many times that same URL has been saved by other users
• You can share your links with others who are interested
• You can peek into other stacks and find more links to things you are interested in
• You can use tags to search for your interests
• And, say you have a new writing protege, you could email your links to him/her.

That’s the quick and dirty lowdown on social bookmarking. Do you use it? What do you use? Do you like it?

NOTE: I was contacted by Grazely.com after writing this post and they have built a lovely social bookmarking site similar to what I have described here along with some fabulous encryption additions. So, if you are shopping for a new bookmarking dealy, be sure to stop by their fab site: www.grazely.com