Brewster Kahle used to talk about the Internet as a huge book that everyone was collaboratively writing, and in that spirit, we adopted early on the metaphor of "bookmarking" to note online addresses we might return to for whatever reason. Bookmarking was crucial to evolving browser navigation, and soon enough we had web sites where we could store bookmarks. A site called del.icio.ous gave us a way to categorize bookmarks with simple tags. Any user of the system could create a personal set of tags - roll your own taxonomy. So why not share tags and bookmarks with others? That's the concept of social bookmarking, shared sites, navigation, and bottom-up taxonomies or "folksonomies." Social bookmarking became a popular way to share content, and to "vote" with your feet - using algorithms that rate content by the number of bookmarks and the number of links. This is all part of the evolution of a web-facilitated mediasphere where the line between content producer and content consumer is blurred, and crowds collaborate in making and extending stories and knowledge.
We can facilitate the social bookmarking of our own content by adding "blogware" that makes it easy to bookmark a site at one of the many social bookmarking and collaborative content sites that have appeared. We've done this at bootstrapaustin.org - we've added a drop-down menu to the footer of each post for bookmarking posts at del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, ma.gnolia, Yahoo, Google, Stumbleupon and Facebook.
Social bookmarking can be a powerful way for this community to share knowledge about bootstrapping with each other and the world. We strongly encourage everybody to read the Bootsap Austin blog (http://bootstrapaustin.org) and bookmark those things you find compelling at one or more of the social bookmarking sites listed.
Info about the social bookmarking sites (via Wikipedia):
Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.
Furl (from File Uniform Resource Locators) is a free social bookmarking website that allows members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others.
ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site similar to Delicious.
StumbleUpon is an internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.
At Facebook, you can post bookmarks to you profile.
