I must admit that in preparing for this article, I visited Reddit.com for the first time. It’s functionality appears similar to Digg’s in the form or submitted links that are voted up or down on by users of the site. It looks like it could be fun, but there’s not enough time in my day to follow another one of these social bookmarking sites! I may check in on it occasionally, though.

The widget below is displaying the 5 hottest links on Reddit right now:

Here’s the Wikipedia article, if you’re curious. Enjoy.

Digg.com is one of my new favorite websites. Essentially Digg is a site where readers submit content (videos, pictures, blog posts, or websites) that they feel is interesting, important, or entertaining and other readers can choose to agree that the content is valuable (”Digg” the content), ignore it, or “Bury” it (mark it as uninteresting or false).

When you first visit Digg’s homepage, you’ll see the “front page” Digg stories that have been made popular by fellow users. In fact, you can see ten of those front page stories in the widget below:

If you like one of the stories, you can just click the Digg link. (You’ll need to create a free user account on Digg.)

All of the information on Digg is broken down into one of eight categories each with their own sub-categories. You are able to filter out stories from these categories.

When you visit a blog or other website, you my encounter an icon like the one below:

This is the most common icon that bloggers use to encourage their readers to submit a story to Digg, or “digg” it if it has already been submitted. If you have a site and would like to incorporate these tools, you can check out this link for resources.

If you’re curious for more information, here’s the link to Digg on Wikipedia.