For me, the power of the internet is in its ability to facilitate communication with other people. Thus, I have lately found myself attracted to various “social networking” websites. Most recently I’ve been experimenting with several social bookmarking sites, all of which offer free memberships.
The most useful of these sites, del.icio.us (pronounced “delicious”), has a really easy user interface that simply lets you save bookmarks to their website on your free account. You can then access your links from any computer that has an internet connection. So, for example, if you find a long article when you’re at work but want to read it later that night when you’re home, you can save it to del.icio.us for later. For me, that fills a really basic need but del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. That means you can also share those links with other people. The primary method for sharing links is via a “network” of users. Whenever you add a new user, they are notified that you are a “fan” of theirs and they can add you to their network. You can see any user’s bookmarks (unless they are explicitly marked “private”) but adding a user to your network puts a convenient link to their profile on your network page.
For all those reasons, del.icio.us has become a mainstay in my suite of web applications. You can find ten of my most recently saved bookmarks in the right sidebar of this blog. I’ve limited this list to just those I have tagged as “share” since I know most of my readers aren’t interested in many of the bookmarks I save. You can find my entire list of bookmarks by clicking the delicious link in the left sidebar under “All Things Mick”. My user name is “rynosoft”. Add me to your network and I’ll do the same for you.
The other two popular social bookmarking sites which I have used the most lately are Digg and Reddit. Users submit links that they think others will find interesting and then other people vote for those links. According to what I read at http://seobergen.no/, these sites are also known to be used for SEO purposes, as one of the crowd-marketing technique. Reddit simply puts a set of up/down arrows next to each article and users can vote it “up” if they like it and “down” if they don’t. On Digg, the terminology is “digg” and “bury” to vote an article up or down, respectively. If an article is voted up or dugg enough, it will appear on the Digg or Reddit front page. Even if you don’t vote, you can still view the most popular articles on the front page of each service. Both also provide a way to specify which kind of content interests you the most and tailors the front page display accordingly. For example, on Reddit, I have selected Politics, Funny, Programming, Entertainment, Business, Pics, Science, Technology, WTF and Offbeat as topics that interest me. In addition to aggregating articles by voting popularity, Digg and Reddit also provide the ability to comment on each article.
Other websites, such as Propeller and StumbleUpon, provide similar services as Digg and Reddit, but are not as popular and frequently have similar content. Yahoo has also launched a competitive website called Buzz which has content that is considerably less nerdy and more mainstream than Digg and Reddit. All of these sites require a (free) membership in order to submit and/or vote for particular articles. You can view my profile for several of these services by clicking the appropriate link in the “All Things Mick” section of the left sidebar.
Finally, if you belong to any of these services, please note that the row of logos that you see under “Share and Enjoy” are buttons for submitting my articles to the corresponding service. These buttons only appear on the page for each article and won’t appear on the front page of this blog. To get to the article page, you have to click on the article’s title, the link to the comments for the article or the “read more” link that appears at the bottom of long articles.