Bookmarks are a great tool for navigating the internet.  Basically a bookmark takes you to a certain webpage that you would like to return to frequently.  Some common bookmarked pages might be yahoo.com, google.com, or yellowpages.com.  Firefox 3.0 simplified the bookmarking process by adding one-click bookmarking just by toggling the star icon that shows up in the url bar for any webpage, but even before this innovation it wasn’t that hard.

So for beginners these simple bookmarks are the usual fare but there are two more types of bookmarks which I find incredibly useful.  One of course is an RSS feed which we have talked about at length, but not everyone knows that you can simply add them to your bookmarks toolbar. If you choose this method a list of recent articles will drop down from the main icon which will be navigated to upon clicking. In my opinion this is vastly inferior to using a reader, but could be perfect for your situation if you 1) have only one or two rss feeds that you care to follow and 2) enjoy incredibly accessible presentation right in your browser.

The second kind of bookmark is one I like to refer to as magic – the bookmarklet. These types of bookmarks are becoming incredibly popular and for good reason. They look like bookmarks, with a simple icon and a title in your bookmarks toolbar, but on clicking they run javascript mini applications which perform tasks that might otherwise take you several clicks, typing, and other inconvenience. Two that I use are the Social Mark Bookmarklet which allows me to submit whatever page I am viewing to a variety of social sites in with an easy-to-use interface and the TinyURL bookmarlet which creates a TinyURL from whatever page I am viewing and immediately copies it to my clipboard so that I can then put in my twitter feed, email, im, or other space-conscious media. Look for these at your favorite social media site in particular, but really lookout for them everywhere because they can make repetitive tasks super simple.

I would say that most internet users fall into one of two categories with regards to bookmarks – either they don’t use bookmarks enough, or they fail to keep their bookmarks tidy.  Let’s deal with the first problem first. Yes, most of us are used to simply typing in the urls to our favorite internet locations, or even just typing the first letter or so and then selecting it from our list of frequently visited sites. I’m not here to tell you that this method isn’t good enough, but what I would say is that for your most common locations, bookmarks might be just what you need as they require you to divert even less thought and allow you to focus on whatever you were hoping to work on by visiting said site. Also, the temporary use bookmark is highly underrated in my opinion. If you have a certain, possibly somewhat obscure site, that you would like to return to maybe later today or maybe tomorrow but then would not need after that, just throw up a bookmark use it then delete it when you are done.

However, if you become a junkie and fail to delete your unneeded links this can lead to our second problem the overflowing bookmarks toolbar which effectively eliminates any usefulness provided thereby. Fortunately this problem is super simple to remedy. Step one is just to throw out the junk. If you find yourself with an overwhelming amount of bookmarks it’s basically an internet guarantee that most of them will be completely worthless to you now. Just delete these right off the top. Now, the next step if you still have many too many bookmarks is to organize them into folders. For example I have a google folder, which holds all of the bookmarks to the google products I use like google talk gadget, google calendar, gmail, google reader, google analytics, etc. This very basic organization method allows me to quickly find what I need without feeling cluttered or overwhelmed.

I have attached links to my favorite bookmarklets that I use regularly, those that were mentioned here and a few more

• Just click on any one of these links and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar to see what it can do
• Subscribe to this link in your existing google reader account.
• TinyURL! make any large url manageable.
• GmailThis!
• Add whatever webpage you are viewing to a variety of social bookmarking sites
• Bookmark on Del.icio.us