Not so long ago, I started noticing all these small colored icons appear below the posts of some blogs I follow. I mean something like this:

Social bookmarking services

OK, here is a confession. I didn’t get what all the icons where about and I also hated the clutter they create.

Well.. it didn’t take me TOO LONG to understand that these icons where a way to bookmark a blog post on one of the many bookmarking services out there.

Well, now that I use del.icio.us and digg more and more I have finally succumbed to the temptation of adding the strip of icons to 360east as well. I found this great WordPress plug-in called WP-Notable which adds the icons to all my posts. But what’s important is that it allows me to choose which of the bookmarking services available I want to feature. I DON’T want all these icons!

So I choose del.icio.us, digg, Newsvine, furl, reddit, and Yahoo’s MyWeb.

All of these are one form or another of the growing phenomenon of ‘social bookmarking’, which, in short, means bookmarking web pages you like and sharing these bookmarks with the world. Once many people started sharing their bookmarks, something new sprung to life: a human (social) way to categorize the content on the web and a way to stay up to date through the ‘intelligence of the crowd’. That’s something very different from simply bookmarking your stuff on your browser and keeping it for yourself.

Why am I writing about this?

Because I am finding out that many of the things that web-freaks like myself take for granted and use everyday, mean nothing to our non-web-freak friends and family.

What is ‘digging’ a story? (a way to vote for a story to get it onto the first page of digg.com. The mass determines what’s important)
What the heck is del.icio.us? (one of the most well-known social bookmarking services, recently acquired by Yahoo)
What is RSS? (A way to stay updated with a continues ‘feed’ of news being pushed at you from a site you ‘subscribe’ to)
What is Flickr? (A photo sharing service, where most of the pictures are accessible to the public, so people can discuss them)
What is WordPress (Free software that enables you to run a sophisticated blog on your website)
Even.. what is blogging? (err..)

You get the point. If this post made all these new web trends clearer even for one person, I would be happy.

Now go ahead and digg, del.icio.us, newsvine, furl, reddit or myweb this story!

Thanks!

Read these related posts on 360east:


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4 responses to “Go ahead.. bookmark your favorite stories and share them!”

  1. schoenerleben Avatar
    schoenerleben

    Just wanted to “introduce” a web browser based on the Gecko engine: Flock (http://www.flock.com/). This one is supposed to be a social web browser, so I thought this might be interesting to you.

  2. bakkouz Avatar
    bakkouz

    I tried flock, didn’t like it much and reverted back to firefox.

  3. Moey Avatar
    Moey

    man, wheres the loop area for that plugin?

  4. Humeid Avatar
    Humeid

    single.php

    and..

    index.php