Social Bookmarking is the practise of saving bookmarks to a Web site and ‘tagging’ them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand is the practise of saving web addresses to your computer. There are many advantages and new possibilities that come along with social bookmarking.

Saving your bookmarks online means that you can access your bookmarks from any computer with an internet connection. The use of ‘tags’ allows bookmarks to be grouped and searched for later.

Storing bookmarks online at sites like del.icio.us, simpy or citeulike with millions of others creates a powerful resource. Searching through these databases returns results, listed by popularity, of websites that users have marked as personally useful. This means search results are very different to the conventional mass search sites.

These sites provide other powerful and interesting ways of locating online resources. You can for example, browse through the links of a user with similar interests to yourself. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of all sites with a particular tag or subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular users links.