Compass Designs

If you ask people what they associate with Web 2.0, on the list will be social bookmarking.  If you're not sure what this is it boils down to a high school popularity contest for webpages.  Take digg for example, tens of thousands of people a day submit webpages to the Digg website.  Further tens of thousands of people then get to vote on them or "digg" them.  The ones that get the most votes gets a bubble to the top of the list and get shown on the Digg homepage.

Although the Digg is probably the biggest one, people talk about a website getting dugg and the server crashing from the traffic, there are a number of other more subtle social bookmarking networks.

Delicious is less of a popularity contest and more a way of storing bookmarks online.  The difference is that you'll bookmarks are visible to everybody else so it's possible to search on the term and see what pages have been bookmarked.

StumbleUpon is the new kid on the block.  It has probably the most advanced algorithm of the three.  A way to think about this social network is that you flag pages that you find interesting, and then suggestions get fed to you by stumble upon.  It's an interesting way to come across a site you may never have under normal circumstances.

The reality is unless you are already a leader in you're niche (in which case you don't need the traffic) you are very unlikely to ever get dugg, stumbled upon or, er, delici-cized(?).

Why on God's green earth do people insist on having 873 social networking icons on every single last one of their articles.  Sometimes I think that social networking has to be one of the biggest cons  in blogging right now, not intentional, but just vastly overrated.

So that leaves me to my competition, whoever can find me a [edit]Joomla site with the most social bookmarking icons will win a free Joomlashack.

I'll close with a great quote from tropicalSeo:

"I pledge to use Digg, Reddit, Delicious and the like as a shortcut to link building. The Digg community is a bunch of annoying little $*&^%*%$ but I will play the game until my sites all have TrustRank out the wazoo from dozens of successful link baits."

Oh yeah, on your way out don't forget to use the Digg icon at the top of this blog post...

[Edit]
IMPORTANT NOTE. I am aware that this has been commented on, flogged to death even a few months ago. As this is a Joomla blog, I was pointing out their widespread use on Joomla powered websites.