Social bookmarking, or using tags to organize web pages into a publicly viewable archive online, is becoming increasingly common among nonprofit organizations and supporting technologists. Social bookmarking tools are preferable to browser bookmarks or favorites in a number of ways, including accessibility from any computer, superior detail in archiving and retrieval and the ability to share our bookmarks as a whole or by tag with other people.

Most of the time it seems to me that the conversation about social bookmarking starts with del.icio.us - probably the most popular social bookmarking tool online. There are many more options available, however, and I thought it would be useful to provide some brief explanation of a few alternatives and some things to consider in making your selection.

Different social bookmarking services offer different features. I would recommend taking a few things into consideration when selecting a service.

First, particular features may be especially important for your type of work: you may like to automatically save cached copies of the pages you bookmark, or you may want to be able to send photos from your phone into your bookmarking account, for example.

Second, the interface for using a particular tool may be especially good or bad for you; I used a service called Furl for a long time until I couldn't stand its tag selection interface anymore, other people like the recommended tags that several services offer.

Finally, you may want to consider which tool other people in your community of practice use. Social bookmarking benefits greatly from network effects - meaning that the more resources submitted and the more people participating in a given system, the more useful that system will be. Furl, for example, has a large number of librarians among its users - so it's very useful for other librarians to use and search inside of.

Below are just a few of my favorite social bookmarking services, described to give you a taste of how these tools work. One good place to find a list of social bookmarking tools is at OnlyWire.com, a service that lets you tag items into multiple systems with one click. (It's good, by the way, for promoting nonprofit causes - get your organization, events, articles etc. into multiple databases.) Another good way to find out about social bookmarking alternatives is to look inside any of these systems that users have found and tagged "socialbookmarking." (Tags are, unfortunately, continuous characters or else they are seen as multiple tags/subject headings.)

You may feel like you have to use the same social bookmarking system that other people on a project do, but that's not really the case. Though some search functionality may be lost, you can easily splice together the RSS feeds for a common tag from multiple different tagging systems that everyone can subscribe to. That's what I did with what I called the NPTech Meta-Feed, items tagged as of interest to nonprofit technologists in many different systems and brought together using a tool called FeedDigest.

Four Social Bookmarking Services Compared

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us (or delicious.com as of a little while ago) was purchased by Yahoo! and is probably the most popular social bookmarking tools online. It is pretty geek-o-centric, meaning that there are more tech resources saved there than anything else, but it's really got a lot of user contributed resources on a wide variety of topics. I was very upset when Del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo! because I thought it should be a public utility (seriously, that would have been awesome).

Del.icio.us has a "mark as private" option, an API (application programming interface) that many people have used to create supporting services or plug-ins and is universally found wherever social bookmarking is engaged in. Social networking services (add this person as my friend) have recently been added to make subscribing to other peoples' bookmarks easy for people intimidated by RSS feeds. You can be pretty sure that del.ico.us is going to be around for a long time because a large number of geeks would freak out if it ended.

The downsides include that the user interface (the look and feel) is relatively unfriendly, improvements on the system have slowed down greatly since the Yahoo! acquisition (continuous development should be a strong point for web based software as a service) and the system is owned by a company that has sent a number of users to Chinese prisons and where at least one executive says about whether his company would have collaborated with Nazis - "I don’t know how I would have felt then." That's probably just hyperbole, though, and at a relatively apocalyptic time like today I don't know that any particular corporate executive can be blamed for moral ambiguity.

Del.icio.us also lacks some key features that other services offer.

Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia.com (magnolia.com takes you to Exxon-Mobil in case you were wondering) is a visually appealing system that emphasizes easy group sharing. It also saves a copy of every page you tag into your archive - something that can be very helpful when sites of interest are changed or removed.

This system has a nice tag cloud for quick selection of tags you've applied to other pages. There is also the option to mark a page as private in your archive.

This is a new system, but it's got most of the basic features and judging by the featured taggers the people behind it are politically sympathetic to social justice concerns.

The company blog is active and that's a good sign. You can easily import bookmarks into Ma.gnolia and out of it.

Blogger extraordinaire Brian Benzinger, who I did a NetSquared interview with, wrote a long review of Ma.gnolia here.

Furl.net

Furl is one of the oldest social bookmarking tools online and is owned by the Looksmart company - one of the first search engines on the web. I interviewed Michael Grubb from Looksmart about social bookmarking and Furl for nonprofits here on NetSquared.

Furl offers many features that few other services have. It saves a copy of tagged web pages, it offers very good recommendations of sites, tags and other users based on your archive and it offers export in ALA or MLA bibliographic formats. Searching inside Furl will display results from your archive, followed by the archives of other users and then from the web at large via Looksmart's search engine.

Many librarians use Furl and the system's users are very loyal. I stopped using it myself when I decided that the topic or tag selection mechanism was intolerably unusable. Unfortunately, Furl doesn't appear to be a system that is being actively developed or upgraded. Nonetheless, many people may really like its feature set.

Markaboo

Markaboo is a very new social bookmarking service, it was launched less than a week ago. Here's why I've exported my bookmarks from del.ico.us and into Markaboo:

Markaboo is open source, under a Creative Commons license. That means that interested programmers can access and work with its code. That's key in making it responsive to user needs.

You can add notes pages to your Markaboo archive, items made up just of your own text and tagged as you see fit but not necessarily tied to a specific web page I've added to my archive.

You can take photos from a mobile device and SMS them, with title and tags, into your Markaboo archive. Now that is sweet.

The system is still just being born, but the developers are very responsible to user feedback and I have every reason to believe that this is going to be fantastic. I'll be using it from now on - unless I decide to export my archive some where else later! I wrote a review of Markaboo, which was followed by a number of comments from readers, over at TechCrunch this weekend.

Conclusion

I hope that this has been a helpful look at some corners of the social bookmarking/tagging world. It's an ever changing world and the demands of users help the tools develop. If you need more reasons to use tags, check out an article I wrote called 13 Reasons to Use Tags. Again, to see even more options, try searching for sites tagged SocialBookmarking inside all of these systems, expecially in del.icio.us.

With practice I imagine you'll find reading feeds and tagging items that come through those feeds will become a common practice for many more people. I can't imagine how I used the web without these tools.