When you think about it, what better place could there possibly be to store your bookmarks than up on the Internet? Instead of locking everything down to your desktop, laptop, home machine, work machine, or whatever other systems you may own, you can access all the sites that you want to visit on any machine at any time – all sorted, organised, and categorised, without making you remember potentially longwinded URLs, or risking forgetting to check a key message board or news site. Mixed with technologies like RSS (Really Simple Syndication newsfeeds) and online email, a web browser isn’t simply a way of peering into the Internet, but a way of instantly accessing to all your pertinent information – and can be as safe and private as you like.

The del.icio.us advantage
That ‘as you like’ part takes a bit of adapting to. To make use of any web service that gives you access to personal data, you have to supply it in the first place. You never quite know who has access behind the scenes, or what might happen in the event of the service being bought by a larger company. In most cases, they are available for free – paid for by the operator being able to data-mine their databases for trend information, finding links between topics, and otherwise building up a picture of who is storing what online. That’s an anonymous ‘who’ – based on types of users and usage patterns in general rather than you personally – but still a potentially discouraging one.

Del.icio.us neatly side-steps this problem by making everything public. You can still register anonymously, with only an email address kept on file in case you lose your password, but once on the system, everyone can browse through your bookmarks, your categories, what else you have saved, your comments, and otherwise follow a breadcrumb trail through the weird and wonderful world of the web. It’s social bookmarking, with popular topics thrust to the forefront as more and more people pick up on them. Del.icio.us is also the ‘purest’ of the big online bookmarking services, and the perfect one to start out with. If you are worried about privacy, try setting up your account with a service such as mailinator.com – after that, the only way for people to know who you are is if you start tagging things up as ‘My Site’, or posting links to your del.icio.us collection. Bear in mind though that the overwhelming majority of the Internet at large really couldn’t give the proverbial stuff about what sites you visit – you might want to think twice about giving your family direct links to entertaining webjunk along with favourite porn sites, but beyond that, they are just links.

All of these bookmarking services work in roughly the same way. After creating an account, you get a special Javascript based bookmark to add to your browser’s menu bar. Clicking this pops up a window that automatically copies in the page address and URL, with fields for any additional information that you might want.

Tagging and bagging
So called ‘tagsonomies’ are the latest Internet trend, and the perfect way of handling bookmarks in services that support them. As a purely random example, take a Dilbert cartoon strip. Using standard bookmarking tools provided in Firefox, IE and so on, you would click ‘Add Bookmark’ and then drop it into a category. But which? Comics? Technology? Funny? Stupid? All of these are appropriate, in different ways. With tagging, it can be all of them simultaneously.

When browsing del.icio.us, you don’t simply see the pages that people have bookmarked, but the tags they have assigned to them as well. One person’s idea of ‘stupid’ may be another’s ‘funny’– or even another’s ‘melon’. There’s no rule that says your tagging has to be consistent with anyone else’s – although for obvious reasons, it helps.

Combined with a search engine, tagging makes it a snap to sort and collect interesting pages as and when you find them. Trying to do the same thing in your browser would lead to the most unwieldy menus and bookmarks in history – while del.icio.us and its peers offer both general browsing, and a built-in search engine to get you straight to the link you want.

The mystery unfurls
Furl is a very similar tool to del.icio.us, but private (unless you specifically make a bookmark public), and with many more options. By far the biggest is that rather than just linking to a page, it takes a copy of it in your personal Furl space – of which there is 5GB assigned to each user – only storing the text. This gives you the ability to search your archive for specific text rather than just page names, as well as get your hands on a copy in the event that the site goes down. There are some exceptions to this however, such as database-driven sites, where this may not be possible. It doesn’t offer support for tagging, although pages can be assigned to multiple categories, which effectively does the same thing, although not quite as fluidly.

Jack of all trades
Spurl is yet another competing service, offering a mix of all three of these methods. In addition to pulling and posting anything you link (and give permission for posting) to your del.icio.us account, it uses both categories and tags to sort your bookmark collection, as well as keeping track of any copies it has in its cache. It’s also the second most convenient to keep on hand, with a tabbed panel installing into your browser’s sidebar (in the case of Firefox and Opera – which often suffers from the lack of plug-in architecture) or directly, if you’re running Internet Explorer.

Don’t worry if the names are getting a touch bizarre by this point. Social bookmarking is firmly rooted in ‘meme’ territory – del.icio.us spawning a host of tools and services with names like nutri.tio.us (a replacement Javascript posting button – now defunct), sid.vicio.us (creating ontologies), and most pretentious of all, introsp.icio.us (analysing your bookmarks and telling you what your interests are). Most controversial of the lot is http://de.lirio.us – an almost exact clone of del.icio.us, aside from the ability to download the source code and run your own personal copy; although there are others, such as Scuttle if that rules it out as a download for you.

Using one of these means that you lose out on the social elements of ‘social’ bookmarking, but get the obvious benefit of privacy – it’s much easier to keep data secure when it’s sitting on your own server.

Rewriting the news
RSS is one of the most obvious uses for tagging technology – making it possible to store all the daily stories that caught your attention in the morning and file them safely away, without having to worry about whether or not you are ever going to look at them again. In most cases, bookmarking one is easy enough – load the page, click the button – but there are exceptions. If you use a service like Bloglines , most stories are read in a web interface rather than the actual page, adding an extra step to the process as you open up the ‘permalink’ on the page to add it to your bookmark collection, although this takes time.

There are several ways around this – in addition to the obvious ‘grin and bear it’ approach. The first is to use a service that offers support for tagging within itself, keeping one collection of bookmarks for news stories and the pages linking to them, and another on a service like del.icio.us that handles the web. Rojo is one service that offers this, but the fairly rigid interface in the current version does tend to get in the way.

The alternative is to install a few hacks and extensions into the browser itself. Here, Bloglines stands out for two reasons: a powerful browsing system, and an API for developers to integrate its features into their own packages. One of the most useful is a Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox, which you can find here . With this installed, Bloglines’ ‘clip it’ button is automatically switched for a button that adds the story to your del.icio.us archive. Other web platforms may have their own methods of accomplishing this – such as plug-ins in IE, or the UserJS feature in Opera.

Out and about
Social interaction has firmly staked its ground as the next big leap for the web, from Flickr photos to RSS newsfeeds – even the BBC is getting into the action, with its new Backstage section opening up everything from news to television feeds to be accessed, edited, remixed and built into new and more exciting forms. Bookmarking is just one of many seemingly static, uninteresting parts of your web experience that are ready to evolve beyond their primitive roots. With RSS, web hosting and synchronisation, every piece of information that you might ever want to go back to can be there at your fingertips.