Website bookmarks – the clickable links stored in your web browser – are handy for helping you stay in touch with your favourite sites.

Social bookmarking services transform the way you manage bookmarks by adding a new dimension – tags – that help you find similar websites recommended by the people who visit them. And all without compromising anyone’s online privacy.

In this feature, we’ll use the generic term ‘bookmarks’ throughout because we prefer it. In Internet Explorer, however, they are referred to as ‘Favourites’ but they are called Bookmarks in Firefox and Opera. Apart from the name, there’s no other difference.

Social bookmarking is really just an extension of an older idea – online bookmarking. The idea behind that is simply that instead of saving all your bookmarks on your computer, you can store them on a server on the internet.

One of the most well-known online bookmark services is Yahoo Bookmarks. It enables you to save a copy of the bookmarks that are stored in your browser, and if you download the Yahoo toolbar for your browser, saving a bookmark online becomes just as easy as saving it in your browser. The only difference is that if you change browser or even buy a new computer, you won’t lose the stored bookmarks.

So, what’s the difference between online bookmarks and social bookmarks? There are several, but to some degree the boundaries between them are a bit blurred. At their simplest, social bookmarking sites such as Delicious can be used just like Yahoo Bookmarks, and they even provide a button you can install in your web browser to add pages quickly. But they can also go much further than that.

Playing tag
A common way to organise your favourite website pages using social bookmarking sites is by adding tags to them, rather than sorting them into separate folders. Tagging is just a way of labelling a bookmark with a word that describes what it’s about, so you might have a tag for ‘work’ pages, one for ‘hobbies’ and so on.

But you can be much more creative than that. If one of your hobbies is old cars, you might use the tag ‘cars’ and another one for the model; for example, Citroen. You can add lots of tags to the same bookmark, and that means you can look at your bookmarks in different ways.

If you just want to look at nice pictures of Citroen cars, you could call up all those with that tag. But if it’s a mechanical problem you’re trying to solve, you might look for any sites tagged ‘mechanics’, for example.

That might not sound very social just yet, but one of the great things about tags is that you can choose to let other people search your stored bookmarks (it’s also possible to prevent people doing this), and you can search theirs too.

So, when you search for sites tagged with ‘Citroen’ and ‘mechanics’ you could see pages that other people have added both tags to, which might lead you to website pages you haven’t seen before. In short, it’s a little like having other people point out useful places to you on the internet.

A Delicious taster
Let’s first take a look at how to use Delicious. Start your web browser and head to www.delicious.com. You’ll need to click on the register link on the first page. Then, on the next screen, you’ll need to pick a name for yourself and enter your email address and a password. Click Register and then you’ll be asked to install buttons into your browser.

Click Install Buttons Now or follow the on-screen instructions if you use a browser other than Internet Explorer. Choose to Run the file that’s sent from Delicious to your computer and work through the installer. When that’s done, check your email – you should have a message with a link you need to click to fully activate your new Delicious account.