This is a reprint of a "Hacker Housewife" article I wrote for the TNH Newsletter (the subscription form is to the far right). Now seemed a good time to put it in the blog, too.
If you've spent any time at TNH lately, you may have noticed at the bottom of posts there's a line that says:
Bookmark/Search this post with:
...and then a bunch of weird links like delicious, stumble upon, sk*rt and digg.
What are these mysterious links? And why should you care?
Those links are to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is a way to share your bookmarks with others. It also allows you to keep your bookmarks in a central location, accessible from any device with a web browser. You can keep your links private, share them with a network of friends, or share them with the world.
For example, I share my bookmarks with the world. You can see my latest links on del.icio.us on the front page of TNH. I used to keep a weblinks module on TNH to do this, but it never worked right. It's so much easier to do it via del.icio.us!
Membership at these sites is free. It's very, very easy to get lost at social bookmarking sites--lost in a good way. Stumble Upon, for instance, allows you to randomly "stumble upon" sites in a particular topic with a click. You can then give the site a thumbs up or thumbs down if you've put their toolbar on your browser (which I recommend).
The female-focused sk*rt works like digg. But while digg is geared towards technology and guy stuff, sk*rt is geared toward women's issues. If you see a story you like on sk*rt's pages, you can vote for the story and move it up the rankings. The neatest thing about social bookmarking sites is that you often see stories and pages you might never be aware of otherwise.
Now you can join the fun! If you join del.icio.us (which is free) and tag things with "newhomemaker," your links will now show up on the home page and in the left hand sidebar!
And one other thing. If you bookmark TNH stories on del.icio.us (don't tag TNH stories "newhomemaker," please) and rate them up at places like Stumble Upon and sk*rt, it helps TNH. I appreciate it when you do that, so very much.
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