Social networking is a great way to info share with your friends, keep in touch, and find other people who have the same interests as you! An online bookmark manager is a great way to share your intersts with other people, because when you participate in social tagging, you let other people know how you classify things. And when they know that rather than what’s written on the page, what the actual overall idea or theme of the bookmark page is, people who are looking for something of that topic will find it.

The first site to make social tagging popoular was Delicious, originally del.icio.us, and the trend has definitely grown from there. Once a page is bookmarked and annotated with whatever notes you think are relevent to explaining it’s content to other users, and you’re done. It’s really simple, usually there’s a quick option in the bookmark software on the website, especially when it’s trying to be really user friendly, which social media websites always are.

Sites try especially hard to be user friendly if they have paid services, and some social bookmarking sites have a subscription fee that people have to pay in order to use them. However, whether you pay for the site or not, an interesting phenomena happens with each individual bookmarking site, for different popular interests. A folksonomy tends to be born, which is basically a unique way of moving words around to make tags for certain things that would specific to each website. So, not only are you contributing to linking things together when you are bookmarking things under certain interests, but to an extent you are helping it evolve into something more advanced as well!

Allowing people to have oppinions and share them is a huge part of the appeal of social media, and having a multitude of interests makes people more versatile and well rounded. Being able to share with your friends is a great benefit the internet has given people since it’s advent, and social bookmarking is a great way to catalogue your likes and dislikes, your interests and detests, so that other people can see!

In this day and age, when grandmothers and even great grandmothers sit around their kitchen tables talking about the convenience of Delicious bookmarks, and expressing frustration that nobody has commented on the photos with which they tagged their friends last night. While people seem to assume that computer and internet technologies like Delicious bookmarks, social tagging, online bookmark managers, and other cool stuff is inaccessible to older folks, nothing could be further than the truth. In fact, most software, websites, and computer technology is so easy to use, that it is accessible to almost anyone with internet access and a functioning brain.

While the emergence of social media can be traced back to college students during the early to mid 1990s, it seems that there are as many people over the age of 40 who utilize social media and bookmark software just as frequently as teens and twenty somethings. Clearly, the stereotype of the middle aged person who is hopeless when it comes to using Delicious bookmarks and accessing previously bookmarked pages is far from accurate. In fact, any trouble that older people have when using my Delicious or sharing photos might be attributed to the fact that it might be too easy. Since people over 45 or 50 are used to doing things the hard way, many just assume that using certain cool technologies must be difficult. As such, they make it harder than it really is by second guessing themselves, only to discover that using Delicious bookmarks really is that easy.

The technological buzzwords have always been fast, easy, and efficient. However, when things are too easy, that might lead to problems for those who are used to doing it the hard way. For instance, Delicious bookmarks might seem like science fiction to those who grew up with card catalogs, ascending dusty library shelves, and carting around trapper keepers. But it usually does not take longer than a few minutes or a few hours for most people, regardless of age, to get the hang of tagging, sharing, and using Delicious bookmarks. After all, making things faster, easier, and more efficient is the whole point of technological advancement, right?