Bookmark

Bookmarks are a fundamental web browser feature. If you’ve used the Internet, chances are you’ve used bookmarks — called “Favorites” in Internet Explorer. The primary purpose of bookmarks is to easily catalog and access previously-visited web pages. When you click a bookmark, your browser takes you straight to the web address (URL) associated with it.

Newer browsers have expanded the bookmark feature: Mozilla Firefox has live bookmarks, which use RSS feeds to provide links to recently posted articles; other browsers support “bookmarklets,” small scripts stored as bookmarks that perform some task or function when clicked.

With the explosion of the Web’s social networking capabilities came bookmark sharing. Bookmarks are saved to a publicly-accessible Internet site which groups the bookmarks by tag. RSS feeds alert subscribers when new bookmarks are saved, shared, and tagged by others. Shared bookmarks often come with ratings, comments, web annotations, and other social networking features.