Earth To Geek

What is del.icio.us, Digg, and others like it?

These types of sites are what is called a “Social Bookmarking” or “Social News” site. Basically, it works like the favorites or bookmarks feature in your browser, where you can save sites you like or visit on a regular basis for later use. The main difference is that these are web based services so you can save your bookmarks and access them for later.

By far the most popular (and the one that I use is del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). If you’re like me, before these types of services, I used to email links to myself from work to home, or vice-versa. With these types of services, all that needs to be done is to save it to your bookmarks in del.icio.us.

There are many tools available to integrate and allow easy access to these bookmarks directly within your browser. For example, Firefox and Internet Explorer users can install a special toolbar button on their browser. To save a bookmark, all you have to click on a button, it logs you into the service and brings you directly into the bookmarks page. (click here to learn more).

Another nice feature of these types of services, is that you can search through everyone else’s bookmarks to find something you’re looking for. Many times this can be more effective than using a regular search engine like Yahoo! or Google, since the results are things that other people have found.