Social Networking 101

You will find on this blog – and many others – colorful little graphics, icons, badges, and text links imploring you do things such as "Digg this," "Add to Del.icio.us," "Fav this blog Technorati," etc.

For the uninformed, this probably looks like some weird sort of techno-geek lingo that you don't understand, and are not even sure that you want to!

I can assure you, these items are perfectly harmless, and in most cases, they can even be of assistance.

In short, they are used so you can add the page that you are looking at to various "social networks" so that you and others can refer back to those pages, as well as refer those pages to other people.

All of the sites that offer this functionality are completely free of charge, and the colorful methods that you find for bookmarking these pages make the entire process very, very simple.

Basically, you choose however many of these sites that you want to be a member of, you sign up for a free account, and you are instantly able to start bookmarking websites, as well as sharing those websites with other people.

The "sharing" part comes in because content on the Internet is ranked by popularity, and social networking puts the ranking of the quality of that content into the hands of the people who read it.

By adding a website to one of these sites, not only do you create a bookmark that you can refer back to yourself, but you also cast a "vote" for that site which allows other people who may be interested in that content to find it via their own membership to Digg, Reddit, Technorati, etc.

There are dozens of these services on the Internet, but you really don't need to subscribe to that many. At the moment, 3 of the biggest social networking sites are Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Specific to blogging, Technorati is the primary site that lists the popularity of various blogs.

One final note. If you like a website or a blog that you are reading, and you see these icons, badges, etc., on the site, please use them!

Bloggers and website owners achieve success almost primarily through this online "word of mouth" method, so if you see value in the content that you are reading, help that blogger or website owner by adding his/her pages to your favorite social networking site.

That being said, you can start your social networking adventure right now by adding THIS page to your bookmarks! This will allow other people who are confused about social networking to have a chance to read this (fairly) brief overview of the process!