Dev SIte

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Users can access their bookmarks from any computer.

Why not the standard bookmarks on your browser?

Some bookmarks on browsers are available only on that particular machine you created them on. Other browsers (Firefox/Chrome/Safari) allow you to use your bookmarks from another machine but same browser. So to make sure that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere and any browsers you can look at the below booking marking services.

Why “Social”

When you bookmark a site you can set it is private (accessible only to you) or public (access to anybody using that bookmarking site). Your bookmarks can then be shared with friends, followers  in different social medium like Facebook, Twitter etc (depending on your settings). Social bookmarking websites  are great way to find out what the Internet likes at the moment.

More business

Social bookmarking sites are more often visited by search engines as a means of finding out either new or popular sites to record in their database. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they get saved, shared, and tagged by other users. It also helps to promote your sites by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with each other.  Social bookmarking also play an important role in SEO – helping more visits to your sites.

Get started

Most of the sites are free, but you need to register. Once  you register, you could upload you contacts and then follow them. This will help you understand what they have bookmarked and will give you samples for future reference.  You can  join their specific groups based on your needs, this will help you find  good reference sites. Once you get an idea of what others are doing, you can slowly grow up to a level of an advanced social book marker. As you start using these sites, you will end up mostly with at least two stacks of your bookmark – one which is private (for your use only – available  anywhere/anytime) and other which you share with friends/groups.

Note : Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr are also social bookmarking sites. The below listed  are  dedicated bookmarking sites – so you get much more features.

List of popular Bookmarking sites

Delicious

Delicious allows you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that you can see the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, the search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find interesting new bookmarks from people like you. Once you have bookmarked at least 5 links, you can build a “Stack”. Each stack is given a name and a group, and once a stack gets published, it is both shared with others and followed.

Additional Help :How to use delicious social bookmarking”

Reddit

Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web. As compared to other it has an informal feel. Users give all the content and decide, through voting, what’s good and what’s not. Links that receive community approval bubble up towards number one, so the front page is constantly in motion and filled with fresh, interesting links.  Users send content in the form of either a link or a text (“self”) post. Links and content can be voted on to move it up the list. Reddit specializes in hosting conversations about content.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon collate ratings from its users to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded users have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine. Designed to bookmark web pages and highlight key points for reference. is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users.

Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg reveals the best content as voted by its users. Drawback of this site – The tops ranked links also show sponsored links, creditably of the rating is lost.

What do I use  : I  use delicious for storing my bookmarks and StumbleUpon for discovering sites.

Remember – When you find a good site, don’t forget to bookmark it for future and if it’s worth sharing .. don’t forget to share with your network.

How easy is it to juggle work and the household? Is it even possible? I am sure you have asked yourself this question, and received different answers at different stages of your life. I love my family as well as what I do at work. So how do I manage to keep the balance?

Balancing work and home-life is tricky and at times frustrating. This is because there are so many things to be done and they have to be done right in a very short time. Is prioritizing between work and home enough? Or is being good at time management enough?

What are the prerequisites to do this balancing act?

I have found that they are:

• Setting priorities
• Support of family and team
• Setting boundaries on family & work time (or effective time management) and
• Compromise

To manage both worlds, I feel, having a good understanding of what are Family time and Work time is of utmost importance. When you are with your family try not to think about work and concentrate on having a good time with the family.

So, what role does support of family and team play in this balancing act? I work in a production support project, and there are times when you work through the night or even through the weekend. It does take a toll on your family life. It would be very difficult to support a client during critical times without the support of the family.

We all may have come across situations where the home front is calling for your attention even as you have commitments to meet at work. At this point you need to have the support of your team leaders and team members to concentrate on the family. This is also where the “Work-From-Home” option can be beneficial.

Managing work and home may even enhance and strengthen each other, but unfortunately most of the time, it ends up in stress. Every person will have a unique way of de-stressing. Some find the smiles of their children great de-stressors. Others might find that spending some personal time, like going out for movie with a friend, helpful. In short, taking a break from the routine is an excellent way to de-stress.

One of the good things about working is I am able to appreciate the issues that a spouse goes through. There are times when your spouse has to work late and you are able to support the spouse better if you yourself have gone through the pressures of working life.

Is your work demanding too much, and at the expense of your family? After all, we are working to ensure that we provide our next generation with a more secure and better life than ours. But what is most valuable to the growth of the young generation is time spent with the parent. I make sure that the time spent with my family is used wisely e.g. instead of watching TV, I try talking to them. I find out what they did during the day or tell them what I did at work. These discussions, I think, will help all parties understand the pressures of every-day life.

If we do not get the balance correct, we will experience lots of stress and not be able to do justice to both fronts. So remember to keep your personal life at home and work life at work and provide the same support to team/family members that you expect to get from them. This will help create a better balance between the demands of the job and the healthy management (and enjoyment) of life outside work.

Have you given a thought to the rewards of doing this juggling act? I know I will never achieve the perfect balance of work and home-life, but I try my best. I feel both my work and home-life have given me a reason to smile at the end of the day and feel satisfied that I am able to utilize my education and experience to the best possible extent.

Note : I wrote this article few years back,but published it now 🙂