Sharing the Free - Advantages of Social Bookmarking With Scuttle

As someone who had only recently become familiar with such terms as RSS and blogs, I was somewhat flustered when my boss asked me about social bookmarking and whether or not something called scuttle would help us. I think I muttered something stupid like, "I don't know why it wouldn't." and went on to ask him something else, to change the topic until I could figure out exactly what he was talking about. Suffice it to say, I spent my lunch period huddled over my computer in the effort to sound knowledgeable about the topic when next our paths would meet.

What I discovered was somewhat two fold. First, it sounded like most of the people writing about this were looking off each other's notes. It seemed as if there wasn't much to be said about the subject. Second, and more importantly, it didn't sound like anything terribly difficult and everybody who was doing it sounded excited. Okay, so I was hooked. But being hooked wasn't enough and I soon set out to find out what the advantages were to social bookmarking and if it would indeed be something we wanted to do. Bookmarking and social bookmarking aren't that far removed, I learned. I knew how to bookmark; didn't everybody?

I just marked things as my favorites so that I could return to them any time I wanted to without having to remember that ginormous URL that was usually attached with a site. I had so many bookmarks in my computer as a matter of fact, that I often missed things as I pulled down my favorites. Social bookmarking is simply taking your list of favorites and making them public. You even got to choose with whom you wanted to share these bookmarks - the world at large or just a few invited guests, as it were. Tagging was simply a way to finally organize all those bookmarks so that people (myself included) knew what the bookmarks were could find things easily.

It took me a little longer to understand scuttle. As I have learned scuttle is simply a free open source program that encourages you to create your own social bookmarks site. Open source only means that they want you to be able to make this into what you want; it encourages modification. This took a minute to sink in, but made sense when I realized that Linux, which a few of us made fun of years ago, was an example of open source software. Funny enough, the Linux site did a terrific job of completing my education, explaining that the beauty of scuttle is that it provides the framework upon which you build what you want, much of the work is laid out for you already. Linux even gave step-by-step directions.

So, not only can you make what you want, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it. So, naturally, I told my boss I was all over it and I'd send him an invite. He just needed to watch his email.