Topic 4    Social bookmarks

Whichever internet browser you use you will probably already have discovered the ‘favourites’ or ‘bookmarks’ features and saved some of you favourite sites. This enables you to return to them easily at a later time. However, have you organised them into folders? If you’ve only got a few bookmarks it's not really necessary to do this, but once you have more than a dozen or so then you might like to try organising them into folders according to topics. You can do this by selecting ‘Favourites’ then ‘Organize Favourites’ from drop down menus in Internet Explorer, or by selecting ‘Bookmarks’ then ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’ in Mozilla Firefox. This is what your screen will look like once you have done this:

The downside of these kinds of Favourites or Bookmarks is that they are based on your own PC so if you use more than one machine for your studies or work then you have to save copies on each machine you use.

This is where online social bookmarking tools can be really useful, as they allow you to save your favourites to a website which you can then access from any PC connected to the Internet. You can also add keyword tags to sites you save; this enables you to group together items on the same subject. Whereas with the Favourites feature in your browser where you put one site in one folder, using social bookmarks and tagging you can assign many different tags to the same site. In this way, when you search through your tags, that same site can appear as a resource within as many subject groups as are relevant.