Save every Web site: best bookmarking tools

The best way to collect cool Web sites used to be to save them to your browser's menu of bookmarks or favorites. But the more you saved, the easier it was to lose track of the pages within an ever-growing list of folders. Thankfully, the Web 2.0 generation of bookmarking tools is more sophisticated and simpler to use. Now you can save long lists of favorite sites online and tag them with topics for easy searches. You can either keep those bookmarks to yourself or put them in the public eye and see what other people save.

We focused on three standouts. The text-simple interface and tech-friendliness of Del.icio.us has won over 1 million users, though newbies may wish it felt a little more fun. Because it's the most popular, however, Del.icio.us can show you that lots of folks are chuckling over, say, a baby toupee site this week.

Windows Live Favorites' options for social networking are limited to integration with Windows Live Spaces. We like that Favorites' colorful interface can display bookmarked pages. Microsoft's tool organizes your bookmarks with subject tags as well as folders.

Diigo is the most useful tool for take-it-with-you research. It not only organizes and tags bookmarks, it also lets you mark up Web pages as you would a paperback book--with sticky notes, highlights, and comments--then share those notes with others.

Other noteworthy bookmarking services include StumbleUpon, a dangerous time killer if you're trying to work. Click the StumbleUpon toolbar button, and it throws random Web sites your way; save and rate worthwhile pages yourself. StumbleUpon lets you fill out a detailed personal profile, as does Blue Dot, whose popular tags include design and music--and which can be fed into your MySpace profile. eSnips is another neat bookmarking/social-networking hybrid.

There's a lot of overlap between bookmarking tools, RSS readers, and news aggregators. In general, turn to bookmarking tools to store sites for the long term. RSS readers, such as Bloglines, deliver the latest news. Aggregators such as Digg are handy for rating and finding motley news and Web sites held in high esteem by other people. And if you want to pool together content old and new, you can make a custom home page with a service such as My Yahoo, Netvibes, Jeteye or Windows Live.com.

Del.icio.us Windows Live Favorites

Diigo