Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here

Over the next week, I’ll be doing a series of seven posts regarding the most basic aspects of Web 2.0: social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing and blogs. In each segment, I’ll be reviewing key sites as well as suggesting ones you might not have heard of.

Social bookmarking is the idea of being able to share your bookmarks (favourite websites which you ‘bookmark’) with other people and you can also use theirs. Also, social bookmarking provides a way for you to access your bookmarks from pretty much any Internet-connected computer worldwide!

A key feature to social bookmarking is something called folksonomy (or as it’s more commonly known: tagging). Folksonomy provides more flexibility than taxonomy (the category-based system that’s typically used) as folksonomy the user chooses by inputting ‘keywords’ related to the link. He can then search these keywords to find links with certain ones. This allows the user much more control than having to categorise things as ‘Internet’ as he could choose to split this up into many tags (and it’s generally quicker to create a new tag than a new category/sub-category).

del.icio.us

del.icio.us is, by far, the most popular social bookmarking site and is owned by Yahoo!. The site has a relatively small amount of features which consequently makes it easy to use! I personally use del.icio.us as it has all the features that I require.

They provide a bookmarklet which allows you to add bookmarks by simply clicking a button in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar or alternatively you can post them by manually entering the URL, title and description on del.icio.us’ site.

The form to submit a site is simple as it only requires you to enter the address, title, description and tags. Tags are suggested from your previous tags and other people’s tags for that site.

del.icio.us provide simple social features such as the ability of sending links to other users who you add to your network by tagging it as for:username (for example, to send one to me you’d say for:computerjoe). Of course, you can browse through other people’s public bookmarks and find users who bookmark the same sites as yourself.

As I mentioned above, you have the ability to specify whether you wish to make bookmarks public or not; to use private bookmarks you must visit go into settings>bookmarks>private saving and enable it. (see left image)

Furl

Furl is LookSmart‘s social bookmarking engine which seems to use a strange of mixture of ratings, taxonomy and folkosonomy. You bookmark a site by clicking a bookmarklet which launches a pop-up. In the pop-up, you are asked to choose a rating, title, topics, keywords, write a comment and provide a clipping. A useful feature is the ability to mark a bookmark as ‘read’ or ‘unread’ as well as being able to have private bookmarks without altering any settings.

del.icio.us is much simpler to use than Furl and I think del.icio.us is much lighter and consequently fast to load whilst Furl seems to use quite a few graphics. Furl does have some nice features, though, such as the ability to search for a bookmarks based on the date they were posted.

I suggest you use del.icio.us, but you could give Furl a go!

Clipmarks

Clipmarks isn’t a typical social bookmarking site; the site provides ‘social annotation’ which allows you to take extracts of text or images from a website (clippings), make a comment about them, tag it and then share it or keep it private.

Unlike the other sites reviewed, Clipmarks requires installation of a browser plug-in in order to post ‘clippings’ but none are needed to read them. This makes it much less portable than the other sites I’ve reviewed but it provides a much better experience.

Community is something which extremely large sites such as del.icio.us lack but Clipmarks is always complimented on having such a strong sense of it. You will often find other users commenting on your clippings or ‘popping’ them. Popping sends it to the top of a lsit attracting more reads of the clipping, basically a clipping is popped if someone finds it interesting.

Clipping is a productive way to keep notes, too, and people such as students would no doubt find it useful.

It’s rumoured that this site will soon be acquired by Forbes.

Ma.gnolia.com

Mag.nolia is another social bookmarking site but unlike del.icio.us or Furl it focuses heavily on community with features such as groups. It also allows you to use your OpenID, a single sign on which is explained well here, to log-in.

Mag.nolia has some of the features Furl has, such as ratings, whilst remaining as simple as del.icio.us. Adding a URL can be done through a form or bookmarklet and all you must provide are tags, a rating, description and title. You also have the option to keep it private. They also provide ‘tiny URLs’, similar to the ones TinyURL or SnipURL provide but just longer, for any address you submit.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s article on photo sharing!

Tags: web 2.0 for dummies, web 2.0, social bookmarking, bookmarking