If your life is anything like mine, you spend a lot of time online – reading articles for work, keeping up with current affairs, socializing with friends, and pursuing hobbies and interests.  Much of that time is in small chunks too – 30 minutes before I get ready for work, 10 minutes before a meeting, a few minutes while dinner finishes cooking, and another bit before bed.  All that time adds up, but it certainly makes it hard to keep track of what I found where.

Enter social bookmarking and tagging.

What is social bookmarking?

It’s an online service that allows you to manage, organize and share your bookmarks.

How is this better than bookmarks in my browser?

These services set themselves apart from browser bookmarks in two ways:

• portability – your bookmarks are stored online so you can access them from anywhere – home, work and even your smart phone. No more bookmarking a great site for research you’re doing at home only to need it the next day while you’re at work.
• organization – rather than using a hierarchical folder system, you associate an unlimited number of tags and notes with individual bookmarks.

What is tagging?

Tagging is an integrated part of Web 2.0, and with good reason.  As content creation increases dramatically, so does our need to organize and categorize it all so we can find that perfectly relevant post/comment/image/video as soon as we need it.

If you write blog posts, use labels in gmail, upload images to flickr or share videos on youtube then you’ve been introduced to tagging.

Simply put, tagging allows you to associate a list of words with the content you’re describing. Let’s say you’re collecting recipes to cook for your friend John’s birthday party.  You can tag every recipe with these tags

• recipe
• johnBday

In addition, you can tag each of them with a few more words that are relevant to the individual recipe.  For example, the chocolate cake may get tagged cake, dessert and the stuffed mushrooms might get mushroom, appetizer.

Tagging Effectively

I made a couple subtle choices above that are worth pointing out.  When I tag, I choose to use the singular version of each word (e.g. recipe, mushroom).  Which way I chose isn’t important, just as long as I follow that decision each time I tag.  If I sometimes use recipe and other times recipes, then I’ll only get a partial listing of my bookmarked recipes whenever I go through my list.

The same advice goes for compound tags.  I created a tag called johnBday.  Tags can’t have spaces, and I dislike typing dashes or underscores, so I just capitalize the first letter of the other words.  It’s probably a holdout from my days as a programmer.  I was always a proponent of Camel Case or Humpback Notation.

What Service Should You Use?

There are many services that offer social bookmarking, but my favorite is Delicious. It has plugins for firefox, chrome, safari, internet explorer, and apps for iphone and blackberry so you’re probably covered.

When you sign up for an account (it’s easy!) you can upload all your current bookmarks.  When you do that it will translate your folders as tags so you have a good starting point.

After you import your current bookmarks, I recommend installing the plugin to make adding bookmarks a breeze.  Just drag the URL to the “tag” icon

and a “save a bookmark” window pops up.  Add your tags and optional notes, click save and you’re done.

Delicious also offers some more advanced features like group edits, renaming, and group deletes.

It’s also important to note that your bookmarks are public by default, but when adding a bookmark you can check “make private” to keep that one to yourself.

Give delicious a try – I think you’re gonna love it.

Your turn

What other ways have you come up with to organize online data?