Social bookmarking is an important phenomenon for all communicators using the Web to get their messages out.

No doubt, most readers of FKCBlog are at least passingly familiar with this phenomenon. (Psst. There's a link to add this post to del.icio.us at the bottom.) But exactly what is social bookmarking and how can it be useful?

To answer this, there's a nice post I just came across at the blog Read/WriteWeb:

The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to answer that question.

We also take a look at how social bookmarking has evolved since del.icio.us. (even del.icio.us itself has evolved a lot!). We compare the features and approaches of the different companies, to see which has gained popularity and what has become the norm in this space.

Click over to the post and see the table outlining social bookmarking sites and their features. Interesting stuff.

Of course, the best way to figure out the value of all this is to just start bookmarking and tagging items. Examine what others have selected and the visibility bookmarked items can provide. Kick off your own bookmarking efforts with this post if you like...

Technorati Tags: communications, social bookmarking, del.icio.us