The following is an explanation of one set of tagging tools, like del.icio.us or Furl. To read about the putting tags into your own blog posts see Tagging Tools.

• Never lose web sites again
• Organize meaningfully, not just alphabetically
• Share with others easily

A new class of online tools lets you bookmark web sites you find into a personal web archive, lets you organize them by categories or subject tags, lets you share them by subject with others, and recommends other web content or users’ archive streams similar to what you’ve bookmarked. This is only the beginning of what some tools offer. Several also save you a cached copy of what the page looked like when you bookmarked it. Typically, you are given a bookmarklet to put on your tool bar that can be clicked whenever you visit a web page you want to save in your archive.

The basic idea is to allow web users to collaboratively classify what they find on the web, instead of relying on centralized systems of organization and discovery. For one view of how this works, feel free to look around my Furl.net archive and my archive in Del.icio.us.

Social bookmarking works well in co-ordination with RSS Feeds. Feeds can be set up to automatically deliver information on any subject and items of interest can be tagged into your social bookmarking archive. This information then makes great fodder for blogging.