Using del.icio.us, Digg and Technorati

The funny icons you can see at the bottom of the blog stories are links to various social networking sites. These allow you to share web pages that you like with other web users, and they're extremely useful for the campaigning work we do. Rather than relying on people to come to our site, social networking allows our stories, reports and actions to be promoted on other sites, and to reach a wider audience.

To do that, we need your help. Set up an account with any or all of these sites and use the links to add our stories to them. There are hundreds of these sites out there but we've chosen a few of the most popular for our easy access links.

del.icio.us

Instead of storing your bookmarks in your browser (which ties you to one computer), you can save them to your del.icio.us account and access them from anywhere. You can also tag your links with whatever descriptions you want, so you can browse them in a variety of different ways.

Things get really interesting when you start looking at what links other people have saved. If you want to find new sites about climate change, you can search through what other del.icio.us users have tagged with 'climate', 'globalwarming' (no spaces in del.icio.us tags!) or any other term of reference you can think of.

So if you like any of the stories on our blog and think it deserves a wider audience, use the del.icio.us link at the bottom to save it to your account and allow other del.icio.us users to find it. It's free to set up an account and for more information, read the useful beginner's guide at beelerspace.com.

We also use del.icio.us to highlight news stories and features we've read elsewhere on the web. Look for the 'What we've read' block on the main blog page and you can also see the full archive in our del.icio.us account. 

Digg

Rather than relying on news editors to set the news agenda, Digg allows its users to push good, interesting or just plain weird stories to the top of the site and bury stories they think are not worth bothering with. If you read and like a story someone else has submitted, you can rate it and increase its 'digg' score.

By using the Digg link on one of our stories, you can add it to the site where other Diggers can find it and rate it. If someone has already submitted it, you can still digg it and promote it further. They also have some really cool tools - the Stack and the Swarm - that allow you to see what people are digging in real time. Setting up an account is free and more details can be found in this handy introduction to Digg.

Technorati

Quite how many blogs are out there is open to debate but certainly there are a hell of a lot. Technorati is a form of search engine that focuses exclusively on blogs, allowing its users to cut through the babble to find what they want, based either on text or tag searches.

The Technorati link on each story will show you who has blogged about it so you can join in the discussion on their site. And if you have your own blog, do comment on our stories should the muse strike to help other blog surfers find us through Technorati. Once again, an account is free and Blogging Blog has a Technorati beginner's guide for (who else?) bloggers.

Other sites

We also have accounts on YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and moblog where we post videos, images and other material. If you use those sites, come and find us!