Bookmarks have been around since books themselves. In fact, as long as people have bound together large stacks of paper and had trouble remembering where they last left off, anything from a small piece of parchment to a plastic strip with a frilly string has been enough for readers.
It makes sense, then, that the digital tool we use as a kind of placeholder for our favorite Web sites and pages is also called a bookmark. Whether it's a meticulously organized list of frequently visited sites or a few articles you'd like to save in order to finish later, most Web browsers allow us to bookmark pages and keep track of sites if we'd like to return to them. Remembering all of those long URLs, some of which have convoluted naming conventions, would take an extremely good memory. Want an example? The next time you're fooling around on YouTube, try remembering a video's specific URL. It's not so easy, is it?
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However, bookmark tools, as useful as they are, have a minor downside. Let's say you're traveling for work, and you're staying in a hotel with Internet access. Your boss has sent you an e-mail that asks for an update on the research you're currently working on. Naturally, you've carefully kept track of every piece of information you've searched for over the past month. So, what's the problem? It's all bookmarked on your desktop computer, which is, of course, back at the office.
One Web site in particular, known as Delicious, offers a solution to this problem. Delicious, formerly known as Del.icio.us, is an online bookmarking destination where users can save bookmarked sites on a personal account. With a username and password, it's possible to call up your own unique database of links from practically anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not you have your personal computer with you at the moment. And Delicious is more than just a bookmark site -- it's a social bookmarking site, which means there's also a focus on sharing along with storing.
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