Finding the news and info you want from a flood of content from a myriad online sources can be daunting for even the most hardened information junkie and the most experienced Internet user.
But thanks to social bookmarking Web sites such as Digg, Reddit, Fark, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, you can filter out a lot of the noise so that you can get directly to the content that you value the most.
Social bookmarking is all about saving bookmarks to a public Web site and tagging them with keywords. You can search social bookmarking for resources by keyword, person or popularity, and even follow the tags and bookmarks of specific users.
It's similar to the practice of bookmarking Web sites on your PC's Web browser, but it comes with a number of important advantages. One of the most obvious perhaps is the fact that you no longer need to manage an unwieldy favourites' folder on your own Web browser.
Instead, you can store your favourite bookmarks on an easy-to-navigate Web site that you can access from any Internet-connected computer. As useful as those features are, they are not the tools that make social bookmarking so powerful for busy people trying to make the most of the Internet's information resources.
It's because these tools are so social in nature that they're changing the way millions of people are using the Internet. Consider, for example, if you want to share useful Web sites with your colleagues, friends or family. Save your bookmarks as a public list, and they'll be able to read them. And if you persuade them to do the same, you'll have the content that they discovered at your fingertips.
It goes further. Once you bookmark a site, you can see who else bookmarked it and the other sites they are interested in. And if you use a common tag, you can see sites that other people have categorised with the same tag as you did.
What this all means is that you don't need to rummage around the Internet for hours because other people have done the work for you. All you need to do is find a bookmarking site you like, and then find the tag that best fits the information you are looking for.
Think of it as a true Web of resources and connections. One that is not restricted to your own favourites' folder, but which taps into the wisdom and judgments of a community of users.
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