List Your "Favorites" on Free Social Bookmarking Sites

When you find a website or Web page that you want to return to in the future, you use your browser's "bookmark" or "favorites" option. Now, thousands of people are also keeping their bookmark collections on websites rather than on their computer. "Social bookmarking," as it known as, has several advantages over just keeping your list of favorite Web pages on one computer.

By keeping your bookmarks on a website, you can access them from anywhere and from any computer. This is especially useful for accessing your favorites from a computer at home and one at work.

Also, by being stored on the Internet, your bookmarks are backed up, so if your computer fails, your list is safely intact.

There are a growing number of website services where anyone can create and access their favorites list, and it's all free.

While bookmarks on social bookmarking websites can be kept private, most users make them public for everyone to see. People can see others who have the same interest as you, and by looking at other people's lists, you can see what sites they consider worth keeping. That can save you time by starting with websites that are most likely going to contain the best content related to your subject.

Social bookmark services encourage users to organize their items with informal tags rather than the traditional system of folders. According to the website Ma.gnolia.com, "tags are keywords given to bookmarks that act like labels for making them easier to find later. Instead of making a folder with a name and putting bookmarks into it, you give tags to bookmarks to describe the website they point to. Individual tags are separated by commas, so they can have spaces and special characters. Some tag examples are: food, Romeo & Juliet, best in show."

According to Wikipedia, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, thus increasing the odds that the listed site is more useful and valuable regarding the subject. However, spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times in an attempt to sway search engines to increase the relevancy of a site.

Some free social bookmarking sites to investigate include:

http://del.icio.us

http://ma.gnolia

http://digg.com

http://technorati.com