A lot of email in my inbox is of the "Check out this link!" variety. This morning, Harold Jarche reminds us, in a post entitled "Free Your Bookmarks," how social bookmarking through sites like del.icio.us can cut email clutter.

Instead of emailing links to everyone you know (we're begging you to stop!), set up tags in del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking site. You can create categories for friends, family, co-workers, clients, particular projects, particular subject areas, types of media (i.e., video), etc.

As you surf the web, tag the interesting content you find with one or more of those categories. Your friends, coworkers, etc. can then monitor the tags through the site or by setting up an RSS feed to the tag that they can plug into their feed reader. Voila! No more "You have to see this video!" emails in the inbox! 

Of course, it's helpful if you can get everyone else to adopt this strategy to so that the email cleanup can go both ways. Maybe if you show them this video, they'll see how cool this is.

UPDATE--In comments on this post, Sue Waters makes the excellent point that group bookmarks are even more helpful when people add notes. Simply highlight a few lines that capture the gist of the article and then hit the Tag button. Or you can add your own notes in the tag box before hitting save.