Circadian Shift

In response to my previous post, which contained a link to this overview of social bookmarking services, Maria asked:

So I don't understand that "social bookmarks" thing. I've tried to, but I guess I'm a bit daft. Could you explain it to me?

Wherein I will respond by posting this definition of "social bookmarking" from Wikipedia (more on the Wikipedia page itself):

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others—a personal knowledge management tool.

Which hopefully answers your question, Maria. However, I feel obligated to supplement that that with a mini link-vomit, which may possibly be of interest to someone:

• Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review -- from D-Lib Magazine, published in April 2005
• Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea -- also from D-Lib; Connotea is a bookmarking service geared toward the academic community
• Organizing links from references -- from easternblot, Eva's science blog; Eva talks about using CiteULike (another bookmarking service for academics) as well as del.icio.us
• Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison -- has some additional definitions and linkage concerning related technologies
• Social Bookmarking Resources -- a list of links from H20 Playlist, which in itself appears to be a social bookmarking service for people at Harvard Law School
• Social Bookmarking -- brief article which likens the social bookmarking phenomenon to what happens in file-sharing networks like Kazaa

Info-junkie that I am, I rather like the social-bookmarking thing as a quick-and-dirty way to capture interesting things that I find online. My "Drive-by Linking" category here on this blog draws in the links that I post to my del.icio.us account. I actually use Spurl as my front-end to capture the links, which get cross-posted to del.icio.us (there were reasons why I started doing that which no longer apply, but I still do it the same way just because).

I've also tried out Furl, which I never really got into (there has also been a Furl backlash), and occasionally use Simpy and Jots.

The thing with bookmarking with bookmarking a ton of links for later, however, is finding the time to go back and revisit them. But that is the subject of another post...