What is Bookmarking?
In this News Room, you can “bookmark” any of our pages or individual articles. Yet, some of you may be wondering what “bookmarking” actually is. And you may also be wondering why you should do it. Well, here’s the lowdown on what it all means and what some of the advantages to you are.
Why you should bookmark
In a nutshell, bookmarking (or social bookmarking as it’s sometimes called) means being able to gather and share information easily and quickly online. Let’s say you’re interested in a subject, field, or an industry. You want to be able to gather as much information as possible about it and keep it in one place where you can get to it whenever you want.
Maybe someone has written an article about hardwood flooring, or golf, or how to restore old cars. Maybe their site is one which you want to let others know about, or just keep tabs on for new content. And maybe you like it enough to share and discuss that content with others, but don’t want to send a million emails to do it.
Bookmarking to the rescue!
This is not a tough thing to do, and you don’t even need to be that great at the technical stuff. It’s literally just a click of a button sometimes along with a bit of description of why you think a web site or an article is interesting or relevant to you.
How to bookmark
Take a look at sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Technorati. These sites all offer similar ways of gathering and sharing information that is relevant to your interests. This is a great way to get the latest information quickly without having to surf the web for hours. It’s a big time-saver, and a great way to learn new things, and share what you’ve got with others.
Simply sign up for free on any or all of these sites and then start clicking bookmarking buttons on site like ours. The buttons will look something like this:
or
Links to help you to start bookmarking right now
For the sake of convenience, here are a few selected links to some “how to” pages on some of the major players of what’s called ‘social bookmarking’ to get you get started.
Digg - http://digg.com/how
Del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/help/getstarted
StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/guide.html
Technorati - http://technorati.com/about/
You can create a personalized page of links to content which is interesting to you, and keep tabs on similar content posted by others who share your interests. Bookmarking is the way that you shape your own Internet experience to suit your needs, rather than by solely relying on search engines like Google to do it for you. So, have fun with it!
