Social Bookmarking Services

 I have been using del.icio.us for a while now but wondered if there was anything better out there...

Link to Social Bookmarking Services And Tools: The Wisdom Of Crowds That Organizes The Web - Robin Good's Latest News

A brief search brought up a number of very good reviews of these social bookmarking tools. This first one listed above is quite detailed on the strengths of each of the picks - not just a tabular feature list, and so easier to get a feel for what you might like.

What is social bookmarking, you ask? Well, if you haven't been "doing it" then all I can say is that you should. Use Wikipedia to get a short description of what it is about, and the reviews that I mention herein also describe some of the benefits. I have touched on the topic before so for this bit, I thought I would concentrate more on the reviews of what tools are out there.

What should you look for in a good tool? Well, to some extent that depends on your personal preferences for style etc. The great news is that all of these are free so it is easy to try them out.

As well as features, and interface design, one of the most important things that you might want to consider is popularity. This is because of the "social" part of social bookmarking. Now, this can be social as in MySpace and other social networking sites, with an emphasis on relating to people, getting friendly etc. But even if you are not interested in that side of things at all, you will still benefit from the network effects of social bookmarking - using the power of large numbers of sentient beings (well, mostly) to help semantically index the web for you. Again, I have written on this in the past. But it does take a large number of users to make that work well...and so, the more popular sites do have an advantage. del.icio.us is the first of these sites and remains the most popular.

A couple of these tools are more oriented towards researchers and clinicians: CiteUlike and Connotea. Neither of them have the very large numbers of users mentioned above but they both have features which make the management of journal references easier. And they both can import/export to formal reference management tools like EndNote, Biblioscape or Reference Manager.

So, get on there...give these tools a whirl and see which ones you like. For the moment, I'm still going to stick with delicious but Connotea looks tempting. This is still an evolving field with some interesting new features appearing all the time. Digg and StumbleUpon both encourage serendipitous browsing and exploration. Check out the Digg Labs - there is a fascinating wee tool that shows you the evolution of new items in real time as they hit cyberspace's collective consciousness.