Sharing With Delicious

Social bookmarking sounds dull, conjuring up images of people passing a book around and leaving a cornucopia of personal bookmarks in it - why would you do it? But I’ve been enlightened - I’ve discovered www.de.licio.us the social bookmarking site and eureka I realise I’ve been missing a trick in my research - a big trick. 

Social bookmarking allows you to mark a website,  or specific content, that you find useful.  OK, so you can do that in favourites on your browser - but when you do it on a community site you share that information with others,  and they share it with you.   Imagine, when you are trying to find information on, say, a ’broken ankle’ that you don’t have to trawl page after page of Google,  you just find sites that others have thought worthwhile - providing they are not internet trolls of course. 

When you bookmark a site you index it with your own tags; so instead of putting an hotel site in your travel folder, and getting cross when you look for it in your hotel folder, you could tag it with Greece, culture, recommendation, hotel or however else you might want to find it again. 

This is useful  because it allows people to share knowledge, find experts, discover new information, and keep a record of corporate knowledge - when an employee leaves all the work they put into the corporate knowledge bank stays.  (The forward thinking should have their own intranet facility rather than share publicly available sites as they may not want to share with competitiors what they are working on .)

Social bookmarking is still in its infancy, but knowledge sharing, helping others build skills and generating insight is both a vital ingredient of community building,  and an important competitive business weapon of the future.  I believe you will hear a lot more of it.