Tagging and Social Bookmarking

The Internet is like an enormous filing cabinet, overflowing with data, photos, papers, videotapes, audio, etc. Each website you visit is like a folder in that filing cabinet. Each individual page, video, photo, etc. that you visit is like a specific document in that file. If someone asked you to find a specific piece of information in that filing cabinet, you'd probably cry--how can you POSSIBLY make sense of it all?

Social bookmarking and tagging are two ways that you can find the information you need in your filing cabinet. They also help you find the best information.

Social Bookmarking

If you've used a web browser like Internet Explorer, you've most likely used a bookmark to identify the websites you want to visit again.

Those bookmarks are maintained on your personal computer in a folder that you can access only if you're using your computer. So if you're at the library or on the road without your computer, then you're out of luck.

Also, you're generally the only person who's adding to your bookmarks, so if you haven't found a site, then it's not going to be in your bookmarks.

Another problem with traditional bookmarking is that you're not always sure what folder you want to put your bookmarks into. A lot of times a particular page or website could fit into more than one folder.

Social bookmarking does three things for you:

1. It puts all of your bookmarks online at a website that you can access from any computer with Internet access.
2. It lets you categorize your bookmarks using keywords called "tags" (more on that in a second). You can use as many keywords for each bookmarked page as you want, so that a page can be "filed" in more than one folder in your filing cabinet.
3. You can see how many other people have also bookmarked a site and see what other sites on the same topic they may have bookmarked. This lets you find new resources more quickly, because presumably the more people who've bookmarked the site, the more valuable the resource.

The most popular social bookmarking site is de.liciou.us

Tags

Tags are keywords that allow you to categorize your bookmarks at a social networking site. They are also used on blogs to organize posts into different topic areas.