Navigating the Web Using Social Bookmarks

Tagging is the buzzword used to describe how people are navigating the web using social bookmarks. It's just like creating a Bookmark or Favorite inside your own web browser. That is, whenever you visit a web page you might want to revisit again, you can create a descriptive tag that's easy to remember. Now, imagine being able to share your bookmarks with others, and also being able to see everybody else's tags. In other words, all your bookmarks as well as other people's bookmarks are all stored on the web and accessible from any computer or browser

The MIT Technology Review ran an interesting article on this topic in June 2005 entitled "Tagging Is It" by Wade Roush. On September 20, 2005, NPR's All Things Considered Commentator David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about how "'Tagging' Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet"

The four most popular sites where members are voluntarily classifying and categorizing web content are:

1. del.icio.us
2. Furl
3. Flickr
4. Rojo

All of the above are free.

The idea behind tagging is, according to Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us, that "a bunch of people doing 'okay' tagging may actually have a higher net value than an authoritative organization telling you how information should be organized."