Store and share your favourites and bookmarks online

Social bookmarking is convenient and can help you find more useful and interesting sites

Website bookmarks – the clickable links stored in your web browser – are handy for helping you stay in touch with your favourite sites.

Social bookmarking services transform the way you manage bookmarks by adding a new dimension – tags – that help you find similar websites recommended by the people who visit them. And all without compromising anyone’s online privacy.

In this feature, we’ll use the generic term ‘bookmarks’ throughout because we prefer it. In Internet Explorer, however, they are referred to as ‘Favourites’ but they are called Bookmarks in Firefox and Opera. Apart from the name, there’s no other difference.

Social bookmarking is really just an extension of an older idea – online bookmarking. The idea behind that is simply that instead of saving all your bookmarks on your computer, you can store them on a server on the internet.

One of the most well-known online bookmark services is Yahoo Bookmarks. It enables you to save a copy of the bookmarks that are stored in your browser, and if you download the Yahoo toolbar for your browser, saving a bookmark online becomes just as easy as saving it in your browser. The only difference is that if you change browser or even buy a new computer, you won’t lose the stored bookmarks.

So, what’s the difference between online bookmarks and social bookmarks? There are several, but to some degree the boundaries between them are a bit blurred. At their simplest, social bookmarking sites such as Delicious can be used just like Yahoo Bookmarks, and they even provide a button you can install in your web browser to add pages quickly. But they can also go much further than that.

Playing tag
A common way to organise your favourite website pages using social bookmarking sites is by adding tags to them, rather than sorting them into separate folders. Tagging is just a way of labelling a bookmark with a word that describes what it’s about, so you might have a tag for ‘work’ pages, one for ‘hobbies’ and so on.

But you can be much more creative than that. If one of your hobbies is old cars, you might use the tag ‘cars’ and another one for the model; for example, Citroen. You can add lots of tags to the same bookmark, and that means you can look at your bookmarks in different ways.

If you just want to look at nice pictures of Citroen cars, you could call up all those with that tag. But if it’s a mechanical problem you’re trying to solve, you might look for any sites tagged ‘mechanics’, for example.

That might not sound very social just yet, but one of the great things about tags is that you can choose to let other people search your stored bookmarks (it’s also possible to prevent people doing this), and you can search theirs too.

So, when you search for sites tagged with ‘Citroen’ and ‘mechanics’ you could see pages that other people have added both tags to, which might lead you to website pages you haven’t seen before. In short, it’s a little like having other people point out useful places to you on the internet.

A Delicious taster
Let’s first take a look at how to use Delicious. Start your web browser and head to www.delicious.com. You’ll need to click on the register link on the first page. Then, on the next screen, you’ll need to pick a name for yourself and enter your email address and a password. Click Register and then you’ll be asked to install buttons into your browser.

Click Install Buttons Now or follow the on-screen instructions if you use a browser other than Internet Explorer. Choose to Run the file that’s sent from Delicious to your computer and work through the installer. When that’s done, check your email – you should have a message with a link you need to click to fully activate your new Delicious account.

Next, click the Settings link at the top right of the screen and choose ‘import/upload’ in the Bookmarks category. Follow the on-screen instructions to copy the Favourites or Bookmarks in your browser to Delicious.

Shortly after you’ve uploaded the bookmarks, they will appear on the main Delicious screen. You can click on a bookmark to visit it, just as if it is on your browser. But there’s much more you can do.

Next to each bookmark, you’ll see small links labelled ‘edit/share/delete’. Click share to let other people find a bookmark – but it’s much easier if you edit the bookmark first, so pick one and click that.

You can change the sharing option and also add notes about the site, or add extra words to the tags – you’ll see all the sites you’ve imported have the tag ‘imported’ added to them automatically. Adding tags is key to making the most of Delicious.

Handy and useful
To see how useful tags can be, try typing a few words in the Delicious search box at the top right of the web page; for example ‘citroen ds,’ and you’ll see all the sites other people have shared.

Click a site’s title to go straight there, but if you click instead on the text that says how many people have saved it, you’ll see any notes they’ve added. You can also save a site to your own Delicious bookmarks, too.

As you can see, it’s pretty simple to get started and when you come across a new site, it’s even easier, with the buttons (or links in some browsers) that are added to the browser during installation.

For example, we visited the Computeractive Jargon Buster web page and highlighted the introductory text, then just clicked the tag button in Internet Explorer. In the window that pops up, the details of the site are filled in, and the highlighted text is used as the notes, so all we had to do was add some tags and click Save to store a useful bookmark.

So why not try it out? As you can see, it’s simple and, unlike conventional search engines, you know that other people have found the sites useful, too.

Keep your secrets private
When you import your bookmarks into Delicious, you’ll notice they’re not shared ­ and that’s important.

Before you share your bookmarks, or add new ones, make sure you’re happy for someone to know you’ve added a site. When you share a site, other people can see who added it ­ fine if it’s innocent, but potentially embarrassing if it’s something a little more risqué.

The other thing to remember is that some sites may include things like your username or other information in the URL, so check before bookmarking if you don’t want to accidentally share private information with others.

Check the settings on the site you’re using ­ on Delicious, if you want to keep some sites to yourself, you need to turn on ‘allow private saving’ and then tick the ‘do not share’ box when you add a site.