Not From Lapland

An Idiots Guide To Social Bookmarking

What is social bookmarking/sharing?

Social bookmarking/sharing is simply sharing stuff you like on the internet with your friends.

What does that mean and is it complicated?

You probably already do this.  If you have ever tweeted a link to someone’s blog or shared a link to a website or blog on facebook, then congrats, you’re not a social bookmarking virgin!

There are hundreds of these social bookmarking sites, most you wont have, and really don’t need to, hear about, but the big ones you probably use already or have heard of.

Facebook
Twitter
Google Reader
Delicious
Stumbledupon
Digg

Why bother?

When you share a link to these sites, anyone that follows you/is your friend on these sites can see the link you shared.  It’s a great way of sharing stuff you like and also helping promote those bloggers you love.

But it takes soooo long. I dont have time/can’t be arsed

Opening up all those pages, copying and pasting urls, writing titles and tweets, it can take time and put you off. But fear not, if you want to share stuff with friends or help a blogger you love share a great post there are simple easy ways.

How to Do It Easily And Quickly

Here are three of them.

1. Social bookmarking buttons on the blog

A quick scan of the blog page and you may see some buttons that look like this

Reading across: blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, RSS, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Twitter

If you hit one of these buttons (not these here, this is just a picture of what they look like) it will open up a popup box or take you to a page where you can quickly add the post to the social medium of your choice. Often these buttons will fill in the url and title and such like making it easy for you to just review it and hit send.

I’ve added a funky one to the bottom of my blog posts. If you hover your mouse over it it will give you some sharing options.

2. A button on your toolbar

There is a funky little thing called shareaholic which you can add to your browser toolbar (the bit at the top of your internet page where you can see the address of the page you are on and the back and forward buttons). The shareholic button looks like this

It can be added to Firefox, Chrome, IE8, Safari, Opera, Flock and Songbird browsers quickly and easily.  You can find shareholic here.

When you have it installed and you see a page you’d like to share, simply click the button on your browser and a drop down menu will appear showing options like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Google Reader etc*. You simple select the one you want to send the page to and hit send. You will then get a popup or a new page with most of the info already filled in and you simply review it, add anything you need to and press submit. Done.

* You need to set this up to show your personal choices. Do this by hitting the green shareaholic button on your browser toolbar and then clicking ‘options’ at the bottom of the drop down menu. This will open a new page that will let you choose which options out of the 100′s to show. Personally I use twitter, facebook, google reader share, stumbleupon and technorati favourites.

3.  Share in Google Reader.

If you do most of your reading in Google Reader then this is a simple way to share the posts you love without leaving Greader.  Underneath each post there are several options.

Share – this will share the post with people that follow you in Google reader or on Buzz and you can also put a widget in your blogs sidebar (like the one you can see in mine) that will display the most recent of your shared items.

Send To – this is a brilliant little button that will allow you to send to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon, amongst others. You can set which options you see when you click ‘send to’ by going to settings (top right hand side of the page), ‘reader settings’ and then choosing the ‘Send To’ tab. Just select the ones you want to appear.

Why Should I Bother?

Cause if you don’t the sky will fall and it will all be your fault*

And it’s a nice thing to do. It helps the blogger reach a wider audience, creates backlinks to their blog (which helps them if they are interested in raiseing their blog prfile ranking in lists etc) and lets the blogger know you liked their stuff enough to bother.

* This is not strictly true. In fact some may go as far as to say it’s a lie**

**Unless of course we are referring to my blog. Then of course it is very, very true.

Do I Have To Do It?

No.

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Where do you share blog posts you enjoy?

Have any other tips or tricks you’d like to share?