Consultants use the Internet for information, techniques and research. My colleagues, as well your Daily Tips, provide great URLs but I've heard about social bookmarking as a way to find better sites faster. What is social bookmarking?

Think about trying to organize all your favorite sites or articles from among the billions of web pages. You bookmark good sites and tell your friends, but the web is too dynamic for you to find, much less organize or keep up to date, them all. You can subscribe to clipping services or Google Alerts, both of which will feed you a stream of data. The problem is that these are mechanically and keyword generated and may not be really what interests you.

Social bookmarking is a better way to organize your bookmarks through tagging and to take advantage of the best thinking and judgment of your peers to collectively identify the most relevant sites. You have better and faster access to sites you can use in ways you wouldn't otherwise ever have known about.

A social bookmarking survey (a few years ago) showed that 6 out of 7 people don't use social bookmarking (also called content discovery services) because they don't know about them, don't understand how they work or don't understand their value. If you haven't heard of Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati or other sites, sign up for them and start getting advice from those you know and trust, not just those generated by a machine. It will amaze you how much interesting and useful content you can have fed regularly to you.

Tip: Like any new skill or practice, this is worth a few minutes of your time to master. It goes without saying that your client can benefit from your showing them how to keep up with the latest technology. Who doesn't want to look like a star to our clients?

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