Love Letter to a Printer Icon

Dear Printer Icon,

I miss you. I used to be able to find an article online and click on you to easily print the page. I realize printing is not the "greenest" option, however sometimes I don't have time in the middle of my day to read an article in its entirety. I have an hour long commute on the subway, which is a perfect time to read what I cannot get to during the day.

Nowadays, when I find an article that I want to read online, generally my options are to share it on numerous social bookmarking and social networking sites. I don't want to share it, I just want to read it. Since you abandoned me, I have resorted to copying the text into a word document, blank e-mail, or text file. What a pain!

Did you disappear because you thought e-readers and smart phones have taken over? Think again my friend. Some of us old-fashioned types still prefer to read something on good ole paper. I get so excited when I see you, but it's few and far between. Come back to me, I appreciate you and still need you.

Love, Erin

Social Bookmarking: Can You Digg it?

Recently, I started to hear more about social bookmarking sites, however I didn't understand what these sites are, how they work, or why I would want to use one. Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as "a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources." According to Wikipedia, the concept of online bookmarking has been around since the mid-nineties, but it didn't really catch on at the time. In 2003, Delicious pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking and it has been taking off like wildfire ever since.

Today, there are dozens of popular bookmarking sites and apparently many great uses for them.

How many of these icons do you recognize?

Use #1 - Marketing: When you submit your business, website, or blog onto a social benchmarking site, you increase the likelihood that search engines will find and index your site. Using bookmarking services is a great strategy for generating traffic and in some instances can work too well and crash your server.

Worth your while? Why not, what do you have to lose?! Social benchmarking sites are free, and fairly easy to use. The downside is that there are so many of them to choose from, and to my knowledge there is not a standard process for submission. You've got to do it the old fashioned way, one at a time.

I'm experimenting with posting my blog on a few directory sites (Yahoo, Bing, and Google blog listings, Blogpulse, Bloglines, and Technorati) to see what will happen. Maybe someone other than my mom, boyfriend, and professors may read it.

Use #2 - Being Social: I have never felt the urge to click a little icon to announce to the world what I've read and whether I dug it (Digg anyone?). I understand that some people enjoy this; we need these people, otherwise these sites wouldn't be worth visiting. Bookmarking and ratings inform us of what is newsworthy at the moment, according to the masses vs. "the man," hence social media. Verdict: Worthwhile for others to post. I will stick to being an occasional voyeur for now.

Use #3 - Organizing yourself: I have been using Internet Explorer for years (and am mildly embarrassed about it). I know there is something better or faster out there, perhaps Chrome or Firefox, so have recently been testing out different browsers. The jury's still out on which I prefer.

One of the reasons I've been reluctant to switch browsers is because I heavily rely on my bookmarks and didn't want to start from scratch with a new browser. I didn't know that I can use a social bookmarking site solely for personal organization. Storing my favorite links online will get me through this fickle phase and will mitigate the multiple computer issue (like Dropbox did for my school files).

Taking action: I just signed up for Delicious and imported all my bookmarks from Internet Explorer to start. This transition will take a fair amount of time up front to get organized, and of course time to get used to the change, but hopefully will be worth it.

I chose Delicious because it was one of of the original bookmarking sites and is still one of the most popular. Delicious is tied to my Yahoo account so it was easy to set up, and it seemed more geared towards personal use than some of the other that I checked out, like Digg and Stumbled Upon.

I am the type of person that doesn't like too many choices; more than three and I am overwhelmed. Just like the web browsers, I am sure there may be better ones out there than Internet Explorer, but it takes a fair amount of time and energy to test drive them all. Delicious will have to do. At least the name sounds kind of cool and sexy.