Social bookmarking & social media
The little icons that you see below posts and on the sidebar are social bookmarking and sharing links. These allow you to post information you find interesting on my blog to your favourite social sites, or save them to your own online bookmarking accounts.
You don’t need to belong to all of them, I know I don’t, but you may find one or more of them interesting.
Technorati for example is a blog search engine where you can probably find any kind of blog you are looking for. They claim to be “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.“.
Another one, and my personal favourite is del.icio.us. At first I didn’t really get it, and it has to be one of the ugliest interfaces I’ve ever seen, but once you get it, it’s an invaluable tool. Delicious is an online bookmarking service. This means you can store and share all your bookmarks online. No longer do you have to worry about finding your favourite sites when you’re not at home. I have stopped using web browser bookmarks all together since Delicious. As I mentioned you can also share your bookmarks with people and some companies have started their own official Delicious sites. You can read my post on Adobe’s huge delicious site for example. You can also check out my own delicious bookmarks.
Other sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Slashdot are all about what’s currently popular in their respective niches. These are social news sites.
Then there’s social communities like Facebook where you can submit a favoroute link for all your friends to see.
The icons you see are my site are just a small slice of what’s out there. For more in depth information check out Wikipedia’s entries on social bookmarking and social media.
