Reframe It is an awesome tool for facilitating online dialog with major potential in education, corporate communications, social networking, citizen empowerment, and many more areas. With all this really cool stuff, it is easy to overlook Reframe It’s potential for intelligent bookmarking.

Think about it. With Reframe It, one can easily create a list of bookmarks that are available from any computer. Sure, the Foxmarks Firefox extension does that too. But with Reframe It, you can bookmark a specific item on a web page. Or you can bookmark several specific items on the same page and add comments to each. You can also choose to share your bookmarks privately or publicly.

Here is what I hope will be some useful information to help you get started:

First, you may not have realized that Reframe It allows you to bookmark comments via the margin: simply open the comment and click the bookmark button as shown below.

When you want to access your bookmarked comments, go to Reframe It, click the Comments button, and click on the Bookmarked Comments button at the top.

That works, but it’s pretty basic. For many people, this will be enough. Others will want more power to organize and share these bookmarks.

The real bookmarking power is in Reframe It Groups. There are 3 basic types of Reframe It Groups: public, restricted, and private.

Public groups are visible to everyone. In addition, any Reframe It user can join any public group and share a comment with that group. As such, public groups are best used for discovering and sharing online content. So you might want to consider forming a public group, sharing some pages of special concern to that group, and seeing what other group members also share into that group. This might help you discover content that you want to bookmark with a restricted or private group, especially if you invite your friends to join the group too!

Like public groups, restricted groups are visible to everyone. The key difference is that you get to control who may share comments with your restricted groups. So if you want to use a Reframe It group as a collection of bookmarks that you want to share publicly so that the whole world knows what elements of the web you find most interesting and worthy of sharing, a restricted group is the way to go.

Or if you just want to categorize your bookmarks without broadcasting them to the public, what you want is one or more private groups. As the name implies, a private group is visible only to its administrator and anyone the group’s administrator chooses to invite.

So, with that in mind, the first step is to create one or more groups. Depending on your needs, you might choose to create a mix of public, restricted, and private groups. If you’re making a public or restricted group, be sure to enter a good description and some categories in order to attract more Reframe It users. Once this is done, the only thing left to do is to share your comments into these groups.

And, of course, no bookmarking system would be complete without the ability to easily retrieve your bookmarks. This can be done by simply going to Reframe It, clicking on Groups, and then clicking on My Groups. There you will see a list of groups you belong to, which is your path to all the comments in each group.

I hope this is helpful. Please feel free to play around, ask questions, make suggestions, etc…. We are looking forward to implementing many great new features in the months ahead. But the most important features are the ones our users want and use.