Social Bookmarking

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a way to store, organize, and search websites so you can keep information in one place for future access, and share links of interest around a specific topic. You can save links to (or “bookmark”) web pages that you want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but you can choose to save them privately and share them only with specific people, groups, and networks.

Social bookmarking sites use “tags” or keywords to help organize the items you bookmarked. Tags also help you and others search bookmarks and find information. For example, if you were to tag this page, you might use the tags, “HIV”, “AIDS”, “Social Bookmarks”, “New Media”, “AIDS.gov”.

There are many social bookmarking sites, but some of the most popular ones are Delicious and diigo. Others like digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon allow you to comment on and share other people’s bookmarks. Pinterest can be used as a visual bookmarking medium, and Twitter can be used as social bookmarking by favoriting tweets.

How Can I Use Social Bookmarking in Response to HIV?

• Organize HIV resources and share them with your colleagues, clients, and friends.
• Engage with others who are bookmarking and tagging HIV-related websites.
• Subscribe to receive updates when an HIV website or article is tagged.
• Provide opportunities for people to bookmark or tag your website and articles.

What are Some Examples from the Field?

• AIDS.gov’s “Playing Favorites - Organizing and Sharing Bookmarked Webpages” blog post
• Delicious public bookmarks tagged as “HIV/AIDS”
• StumbleUpon’s links tagged as “HIV-AIDS”

Where Can I Learn More?

• Common Craft’s Video “Social Bookmarking in Plain English”