How do you keep track of your favorite websites? Most people save them as bookmarks or favorites within their browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) Bookmarks are links to websites. They’re handy because you don’t have to remember or type in the web address – just click on the bookmark to get to the website.

But there are limitations to this method. The bookmarks are stored within your browser’s files on your computer. Thus, when you use a different browser or a different computer, you won’t have access to your complete list of bookmarks.

A better way to save bookmarks is to store them online at one or more of the free online bookmark managers. (See list below.) It is easy to upload your bookmarks from your computer. Instructions are at the bookmarking websites.

Once your bookmarks are online, you’ll have access to all your bookmarks at home, at work, and when you travel, regardless of which browser or which computer you’re using, as long as you have an Internet connection.

A practical feature of online bookmarking is the use of keywords (“tags”) rather than folders. Instead of organizing your bookmarks into various subject folders, you assign keyword tags to identify them, which makes them easy to find later. You can assign as many tags as you wish to a single bookmark.

You can also opt to make your bookmarks public (this is called social bookmarking.) The idea is for people to share what they have found useful. With social bookmarking you can search your own as well as other people’s collections of bookmarks, to find websites that are of interest to you.

For example, suppose you are interested in finding websites related to left-handedness. A search on Google yields thousands and thousands of hits. On the other hand, searching through public collections of bookmarks will yield fewer hits, but every one of them will have been hand-picked by people who liked the websites enough to bookmark them.

Here are some of the most popular online bookmarking websites. They are all searchable by topic. You’ll see that at two of them you can save whole web pages, not just the links. This is especially handy for saving online newspaper articles. If you save the page itself, you will retain a copy of a news article long after the original is moved to the newspaper’s archives, where you would otherwise have to pay for it.

• Furl.NET (stands for “file URLs”) – Allows you to create an online archive of Web pages that you want to save for future reference. You’re not just saving the link, but the actual page.
• Spurl.net – Saves both the bookmark link and a copy of the web page itself. Also includes recommendations for similar or related pages that other people have spurled.

One of the main differences between Furl and Spurl is that with Furl only you have access to your stored web pages. With Spurl you can give other people access. (Both allow public access to your stored links, should you choose that option.)

• Del.icio.us – Yes, this is the correct spelling. It is a “domain hack” that incorporates the .us (instead of .com or .net) as part of the website name. Only social bookmarks are allowed here; everything is public. Del.icio.us is one of the fastest growing phenomena among web denizens. It’s still in the techie stage – in order to get the most out of it, you have to use other programs or add-ons.
• Backflip.com and mybookmarks.com – These have been around for a long time. Folder-based storage, with options to keep private or public.

Pauline Wallin conducts teleclasses (for 6 CE credits) on Internet techniques. For details visit www.drwallin.com/internetguide.html

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