Have Your Own Hub 

I am doing a series of beginner's guides. As I learn you will too. The first in the series is about social bookmarks.

Basic internet users learn right away to use favorites or bookmarks in their browser to save and remember their favorite websites. As we all well know, there's nothing more frustrating than wanting to get back to a site you can no longer recall. The ones you save in your browser are only accessible on that computer for that user because they are saved on the hard drive.

Social bookmarking is the same idea, but since your favorites are now saved on the internet, you can access them from any computer. If you bookmark frequently, this is useful if your hard drive crashes. It is also useful if you use many different computers. You will always be able to access your bookmarks no matter where you travel.

Social bookmark sites tend to gear themselves toward making your bookmarks public. That's how we discover new sites. We learn from each other. Sharing is always a wonderful thing when it comes to finding undiscovered web sites you may have never found through any other means.

When you do not want to share with the whole world, many sites allow you to have private bookmarks as well. This is like it is in your browser. Only you know about them. It is good that some social bookmarking sites offer the private feature because there are favorites you will want to keep to yourself, yet you still want them out there on the internet so you can always access them whenever you want.

All sites are a bit different from each other. I am familiar with StumbleUpon and I will include my review of it first because I know it. I do recognize its limitations and I want to go out and find one a bit cleaner, smoother, more organized, and easier for locating the websites I want to revisit. Something similar to the bookmarks on my browser where I can put them in folders and move them around where I want them, and just text.

I should say here, to be fair, I like StumbleUpon and it is very popular. But I don't think of StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking site, although it can serve that function and it is considered one. I think It is best for surfing the internet and finding random pages that the search engines would never locate for you. For this purpose, it is excellent and I discovered hubpages because of it.

It is true, I can find every page I've ever "stumbled," which makes it a social bookmark. It keeps that information for me, but it's more like a history, in a chronological order (I can't move them around), and it's not text; it's a picture of the website's screen causing me to go through many pages to find a website that I want to relocate. The screenshot is nice for easy recognition, but it is space-consuming.

The other categories for storage include websites I have reviewed and websites I have given a thumbs up, referred to as a favorite. The other three categories include photos, videos and discoveries. Discoveries are the pages that you find and thumbs up for the first time. You are the first reviewer. You discovered the page. I see no way to make it private.

In these ways, it is indeed a social bookmarking website, but not a traditional one and I am a big fan of StumbleUpon, but I just want something more similar to my browser's bookmark feature, which is text I can easily organize and access.

Go along with me as I explore the features of popular social bookmarking websites until I find the one/s I want to use.

I do understand that it is possible to utilize social bookmarking for generating interest in your own sites, thereby generating income and royalties through this method. If that topic is not covered in any depth now, it may be discussed later. It should be obvious though that by bookmarking your own sites in a public setting, it is possible for another internet user to find your page.

Once known as Del.icio.us, now Delicious. This will be the first social bookmarking site I am going to visit, and at least for me, it is likely the most famous. On their home page, it reads: Your bookmarks will organize themselves. Tag your bookmarks. Collections will naturally emerge.

I signed up. Username. Oh great, I have to be original and come up with another one of these again. Came up with one and went on.

Next step, I downloaded the button, well, what I thought was going to be a button that would appear on my navigation toolbar. It turned out not to be just a button, but its own toolbar, a sidebar, and a change to my Firefox menu bar, plus several other changes. Upon further research, I see that if you just want to keep it on more of the button level, use bookmarklets. You can drag and drop the links you want from there.

Here's the changes I'm noticing. Now there's three buttons on my navigation bar. The first one, Delicious, (from left to right) takes you to your Delicious bookmarks page on the Delicious site, the second one, Bookmarks, shows your bookmarks in the sidebar, and the third one, Tag, creates a bookmark for the website.

Luckily, naviagation toolbars are easily altered, so any of these buttons can be removed if you don't like one or two of them (View-Toolbars-Customize-drag and drop).

The major change to the menu bar. Now it reads Delicious between History and Bookmarks. That's a change. Hmmm. No problem. Works for me. I like it. Just a warning though to all of you who don't want to experience changes this drastic, particularly a change to the menu bar, skip Step 2 and use bookmarklets instead.

I'm not much of a fan of the sidebar or another toolbar but I can choose to have those open or closed myself, though not as simply as I would like for the toolbar. There is no way to show/hide the delicous toolbar with just one click without doing a bit of coding. Since the person who started the forum was able to do it with the instructions provided, I have faith I can do it myself.

Here is where I have to give credit to StumbleUpon because SU provides a toggle button in the navigation bar to show/hide its own toolbar and a keyboard shortcut (command+F11) too. At this point, it appears I cannot do that in Delicious without being willing to take on writing code and I have spent an hour or more researching this dilemma.

No one wants to keep their toolbars open all the time because they take up too much space, so a built-in toggling to show/'hide or a keyboard shortcut feature is crucial because View-Toolbars is a pain to use.

I like that it showed up on the menu bar, which might be the most upsetting or annoying to some. I'm noticing changes all over the place the deeper I go. And the more I keep looking, the more I keep discovering. It looks like Delicious indeed inbeds itself deep into your browser settings. Just beware. Uh-oh, it changed my shortcuts.

Now that's something I don't like. It changed my standard command+D (yes, I am a mac user; substitute control for command for PC users) to create a Delicious bookmark instead of a browser bookmark and changed it to something that requires both of my hands (yikes!) shift+command+ L. Whew! Under Tools on my menu bar, I found Delicious options and luckily changed the shortcut back for my browser and I chose a one-handed shortcut for Delicious. Nice save on their part, but I'm still wondering about the show/hide capabilities.

Everyone's preferences will vary, but we've been given many options and some not, and now you know about them before I did. The final step is to import your bookmarks. Do know you can skip steps 2 and 3, the download which we just went through and the import step. I've yet to see a skip on step 1, the sign-up part! Just a little joke there.

I did choose to skip the last step of importing because I want to start with new bookmarks I discover today and then I'll get back to you on how I feel about Delicious. I haven't noticed a page ranking system yet, a thumbs up or down or a place to designate your interests.

I hope there's an uninstall program if I find one I like better now that Delicious has taken over my browser. Oh yes, I am using Firefox so I can uninstall simply by going to Add-ons under Tools. I will be okay.

Mid-day, I thought I would uninstall Delicious and not even use it, but after a nap (or going to bed for the night since it was 9:30 am before I retired), I decided to keep working with it. Now that I've made a few personalizations and bookmarked several pages, (which is simply done by merely clicking the Tags button), I am fairly happy with it. Actually, I like it. It's providing me the text bookmarks I wanted. I can organize them accordingly: By Last Added, By Alpha A-Z, By Site, By Most Visitied, and By Last Visited. I can also organize my tags By Alpha A-Z and By Frequency. Plus, I can add them quickly. That I like.

Ah! there is a randomizer button that will take you to any page that has been bookmarked in Delicious, much like the StumbleUpon button, I imagine. I'm going to drag and drop that one.

This is strange. It drags and drops into your browser bookmarks toolbar. I don't want it there. I want it in the Delicious toolbar, obviously. I hope I can move that. I can. I went to View-Toolbars-Customize and moved it to the Delicious toolbar.

I'd say it's rate of turning up pages I like is so far, so good, less though than the page averages I've found through StumbleUpon. SU initially and overall has shown me sites I like better. Delicious has turned up more commercial pages than the ones I like, the obscure or personal pages. We'll see. Maybe this will change over time. I believe the numbers next to the bookmark are the page ranking system, though I don't understand it completely yet.

It is possible to privatize your bookmarks in Delicious. Your imported bookmarks are private by default. Your new additions are public. These can both be changed by choosing edit it for a public one, then checking the do not share box, and saving it, and by clicking the share link next to a private bookmark. Also when saving a new bookmark, you can check the do not share box to make it private.

I'm done haggling with Delicious for the time being. It took quite a bit longer than I would've expected. There's so many things I could get into with Delicious. I could write a hub devoted to it. But I know how to use it and that's what is important.

I've looked at a few of the more well-known social bookmarking sites, like reddit, which I understand to be a news bookmarking site and digg. I won't get into these at this time. I've looked at them and they aren't something that's readily grabbing me, but they may you. Feel free to check out the links at the bottom of the page. These four include lists of the major players in the social bookmarking world. I would refer to it. I enjoyed looking at them.

I've chosen Ma.gnolia for my next one. I figure I've got Delicious for grabbing everything out there for research and knowledge. I should have no problem locating them later because of the tagging system.

I will use Ma.gnolia for more personal bookmarks. I do love the name. The blossoms of the magnolia tree are very beautiful flowers. They symbolize dignity, love and respect of nature, nobility, and perseverance. Mississippi is The Magnolia State.

I already like it. The homepage is simple and elegant. The sign-up doesn't force me to come with yet another username. I can choose from one I've already created. My choices include OpenID, Yahoo, Facebook, Clickpass, WordPress, AOL, LiveJournal, and TypePad. I do need a screen name, but I seem to have an easier time with this than with usernames. They probably seem interchangeable, but I read an article once about the differences that has stuck with me ever since.

So far a cleaner and simpler interface to use. That was one of the other things I was looking for in a social bookmarking site. I'm pleased.

My home page is referred to as Your Stream. The tabs here are labeled Following, Just Yours, and Your Picks.

You can follow people and groups which are displayed in Following. When you find bookmark collections that you like or when another Ma.gnolia member catches your interest, you can follow them.

Just Yours displays activity and is a simple way to get back to your most recent bookmarks.

Once you click the flower beside any item in the Stream it will appear in Your Picks. I like that. This way I can come back to something later that I want to look into more closely and know exactly where to find it.

There's a drop-down menu on every page that includes Home, You, People, Groups, Discover, Help. Home takes you back home. You includes your bookmarks, tags, and groups. People can take you to other member's bookmarks and tags. Groups allow you to gather around a collection of bookmarks. Discover will allow you to pull up nicely-styled pages to look at Recent Bookmarks, Top Bookmarks, and Top Tags.

Tags are used in Ma.gnolia. It is possible to search Top Tags. There's a nice Group list. There's Hot Groups and Hot Bookmarks. There's a 5-star rating system.

Overall, it very well-designed and easy to use. Quite the contrast to Delicious, which sucked up a few too many hours before I could get satisfied with it. I instantly like Ma.gnolia and it keeps getting richer.

You can keep your bookmarks private. There's a tutorial for beginners to social bookmarking and one for experienced users. I highly recommend this because they are easy to read and cover every question you may have.

To add bookmarks while at Ma.gnolia, on almost every page, you'll find the Add Bookmark widget (box). If you are looking at a brief description of a bookmark and you want to bookmark it for yourself, click the + sign. When you are out on the internet, you can keep a bookmarklet which is easy to drag and drop into any toolbar.

Thank you. I finally found an explanation for feeds that makes sense to me. You can subscribe to the results each time you perform a search. As new bookmarks are added to the system that fit your search, they will appear in the feed for the search. It's like having your search updated.

The Ma.gnolia community provides a way for members to share and discuss bookmarks one-on-one or in groups created by members.

There's roots which will let you see what everyone else thinks about the web site, which reminds me of StumbleUpon's reviews.

I highly recommend Ma.gnolia, but it may be a tad girly for some. It has some very nice features. I am more impressed than I expected to be. It is a keeper.

I use Google Bookmarks. They are simple to use. The only thing I had to learn was that labels take the place of folders and to create a label, click edit next to the bookmark. You will need the Google Toolbar or at least the button to bookmark in Google, which is shaped like a star. If you click it twice, you can edit immediately.

Whatever social bookmarking site you join (all of them if you really want to get yourself out there), you will want to bookmark your profile and hubs. To generate more revenue, I would suggest using the URL that includes your referral tracker.

So there you have my personal experience. I would say Google Bookmarks is the most basic, the easiest to pick up and use without any preparation. You do not have to learn anything. If you've used your browser's bookmarks, you can use Google Bookmarks.

StumbleUpon is simply funner (funner, my spell checker picked it up: this needs to be considered a word, maybe the movie, Legally Blonde, will get it added to the dictionaries). It has the nice screenshot of the page. It provides the best random searches, known as "stumbles."

Ma.gnolia is the most elegant and easiest to to navigate. Very simple to learn. An enjoyable and pleasant environment to be in.

Delicious is the most frustrating, though once you get everything how you want, it is lightning quick to get those web sites bookmarked quickly.

That concludes the beginner's guide to social bookmarking. I have spent most of my time reviewing four social bookmarking sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Ma.gnolia, and Google Bookmarks. I have learned quite a bit and I hope I have helped you in some way.

Have Your Own Hub