What’s that funny little flashing thingy on my blog?

The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted a new button that we’ve added to blog posts, forums topics, memorials, recipes and videos that looks like this little fella below:

Click it (see the bottom right-hand corner of this blog post for the real thing) and you’ll see a popup that offers you a range of options that all allow you to add the page you’re looking at to other great websites that you might use, and share it with your friends.

In the first tab, you can post the page that you’re looking at to sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster (‘social networks’) or Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal (blogs). The Social Web tab lets you bookmark the page to your del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit (social bookmarking sites), Yahoo or Google account among others – more on this stuff later.

Finally, the Send/Email tab does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing you to email all the great stuff on What Now? to your family and friends with ease. There’s also an option here to share via MySpace mail, AIM (AOL’s Instant Messenger service) and SMS (mobile texting). Unfortunately, we haven’t had any joy with sending by text but please feel free to try it out anyway – it could just be that it doesn’t like Thomas and me very much and you might have more luck.

All of this basically means that the great stuff that you guys are doing on What Now? can reach a wider audience - raising awareness and encouraging more people to get involved.

So what the Dickens is this social bookmarking palaver?
Ooh, I’m glad you asked. Some of you may already use bookmarks in your internet browser – these are called ‘favorites’ (sic) in Internet Explorer – they are basically a way of ‘stamping’ a web page so that you can easily find your way back to it later.

It’s a good way of being able to get to the sites you love and use all the time (like What Now?) but what about all those great blog posts you’ve read, videos you’ve watched and funny pictures you’ve LOL’d at? How do you store links to all the thousands of web pages that you view and be able to retrieve them quickly and easily when you want to email them to a friend, make yourself look clever in chat or settle a debate in a forum?

The answer is to sign up to a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Reddit. Then you can bookmark all the great stuff you come across on the web with one click and find your way back to it easily by searching your tags. It’s a great way to show the world who you are and what floats your boat and it’s also handy to get a snapshot of what’s hot on the web and in the world at large (Newsvine, Technorati and Digg are good for this).

Some of these sites (notably StumbleUpon, although Digg has started doing it too) will even recommend web sites or pages that you might like, based upon other stuff that you like, and what your friends and people with similar tastes are into. So you if think you’d like what people you like like and what people like you like, you might like those sites.

There, I bet that’s much clearer now, right?

Try it out, it’s fun! Be warned though, it can get addictive.

Add a comment below with any questions.

James :)