Social Bookmarking For Writers

Introduction

As writers, we spend more and more time on the Internet, whether we're researching articles or story ideas, looking for work, or just browsing for fun. As we do this, we often find information or websites that we think will be useful later. The old way of doing this was to use your bookmarks or favourites to keep a list of these places. You could even use scrapbooking tools such as those built into Opera or available for Firefox to keep notes on useful pages. But these tools mimic an old style of working, which is not as intuitive as it could be. Enter social bookmarking.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a way of bookmarking the sites/posts you like on a website. The 'social' part is because the bookmarks are usually public. You can also see whether anyone else has bookmarked the same sites. If you're interested, it shows what interests you share with the rest of webkind.

How Social Bookmarking Works

It's fairly simple. You need to sign up for a social bookmarking site (these include Blinklist, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, Furl, Kaboodle, ma.gnolia, Simpy , Spurl and Wink, to name just a few. Other sites which work on a similar basis are reddit and digg, though these seem to be for submitting stories of interest rather than keeping track of your web life. You can then drag a little button to your browser toolbar which allows you to add pages to your public bookmarks list. On some of the sites you can keep some bookmarks private (which means that in theory you could use it instead of your offline bookmarks (after all, you only need them when you're online, right?)

	MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers 7th Edition Price: $16.99 List Price: $22.00
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Getting The Best From Social Bookmarking

The key to using social bookmarking is tagging. Tagging is using single words or phrases to describe the links you are posting. If you were to tag this post, for example, you might use the tags: social bookmarking, writing, writer's resources. If you thought it was important, you could even use the name of the author as a tag. The key is to keep tags simple, so they can apply to many things. And they don't all have to be words in common use, either. For example, I have a 'myblog' tag to help me find the posts I have done.

The other way writers can improve the usefulness of this tool is to use the notes and comment fields when they tag pages. This is a good place to put an excerpt of the page (some of the services do that automatically) or notes about why you thought it was useful in the first place.

Not all the sites tag in the same way. Some accept single word tags separated by spaces, others accept phrases separated by commas, which is far more useful.

Finding Information

Your profile on the social bookmarking site contains a list or cloud of the tags you have used. Click on these to see all the sites that have been tagged in a particular way. Want to do a more complex search? Easy. Put the terms you want into the search box on the page, and magically a list of all the items with both tags (such as 'freelance' and 'writing') will appear. In many of the bookmarking services, you also get a list of related tags you can click on.

As a writer, I find this a great way of keeping track of information and I use it more and more. What I've learned, though, is that it's only as useful as the tags you use. When tagging, I try to think of three or four words that describe the page, but I don't always get it right. Typos can really mess up the system, too. (The other day, I discovered that one of my tags was 'r' - I still don't know what I intended to type.)

Other Benefits

Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the 'what's new' page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire or Diigo, both of which submit to multiple social bookmarking sites. Once you've signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.