Documentation:Social Bookmarking/Uses and Benefits

Uses and Benefits

Saving/Storing

When you create an account with social bookmarking services, all of your bookmarks will be saved online. Regular bookmarking is usually done through your web browser and everything is stored on your computer's hard drive. Changing computers also means losing the bookmarks you've previously saved.

Social bookmarking provides you access to all of your bookmarks, regardless of which computer you are using provided you have Internet access.

Managing

As you continue to save bookmarks, you will eventually need to organize all the resources you've saved. Regular bookmarking only allows you to save bookmarks by folders. You can't save the same page in multiple places. At the same time, you cannot add descriptions or notes to help you remember why you saved that online resource.

Social bookmarking allows you to add tags or keywords based on topics, ideas, or categories that makes sense to you. A list of tags is automatically generated and opening up a specific one will filter out unrelated bookmarks.

You can also add descriptions or notes to your bookmarks. It can help you remember the reasons why you saved it or what you found most interesting on that site.

In cases where you need to back-up, move or change services, your bookmarks can be easily downloaded and imported to other services.

Sharing

A very important feature of social bookmarking is the ability to share your bookmarks with friends, colleagues and students in a number of ways:

• Your bookmarks can easily be made public to everyone. Users can then see what websites you've bookmarked and what tags you've used.
• Perform a search using tags to see what others have booked using the same keyword.
• Send people a message, a tweet, or an email to your friends when you're saving a new bookmark.
• Social bookmarking sites also generate RSS Feeds that you and others can use with RSS Readers to receive automatic updates when new bookmarks are saved. The feeds can be based on a whole user's list or specific tags. You can also add them your website or course blog.