apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

OK, forgive my ignorance: but what do these do and why do we want them?

I second that. What are these?

I've been using Digg a bit, and was kinda wondering who used which of these . . .

I didn't understand either. So I googled it and they were defined as "social bookmarking icons". Still a little unclear as to how this operates....I guess we can use them to submit articles we like or want to other sites....hmmm. I guess I am a Luddite but I think I neet remedial chicklet training.

I must be getting old. I have no idea what all this is.. Jeez.

wow, the stylish circle really is devoid of techies.

All I know is that Facebook is (reputedly) MySpace for tweens and those who love them, which isn't quite my demographic.

Ah...but we love to learn. Learn us, bombie.

I thought a Chicklet was a type of gum. Glad to see I'm not alone in my ignorance of the brave new world of technology.

These chicklets are for social bookmarking: On del.icio.us, for instance, you can create an account and save bookmarks there. Each bookmark you add can be tagged with some word that describes it. I have a link to Terrior Coffee Company, for instance, tagged with "food", "coffee", "Action" (the town it's in), etc. Other people tag their links, too.

The linking/tagging, in itself, isn't too exciting. The exciting part is the sharing: Users can pull up lists of links tagged "coffee" and see coffee links other people thought were interesting (the list will include my own example above, of course.) If you sort by the number of times someone linked to a page, you can see pages the bulk of users thought were really good; a lot of folks bookmarked them, after all.

It's a way to share info on what you think is interesting. The new chicklets will let users add their bookmarks more easily (and possibly generate more traffic for AT -- a very good thing.)

Thank you joemadeus.

So, the buttons above are to link AT articles into these databases?

Say I'm looking for examples of Ikea expedits in people's homes. I go to one of these sites...create an account and then search. Others will tag articles, etc, (including any at AT that have been linked) and up they come? Our very own google?

All I know is that Facebook is (reputedly) MySpace for tweens and those who love them, which isn't quite my demographic.

You're off by about a decade... Facebook was created for college students, many of whom have graduated by now. They've since opened the doors to high schoolers, but their overall demographic still seems to be college and post-college students. I recently read somewhere that the average age of Facebook users is 25. Most Facebook users, like myself, wouldn't touch MySpace with a ten-foot pole.

Also, although Facebook is a social networking site like MySpace, the similarities end there. You need a school email address to join Facebook and the name on your profile needs to be correct, for one thing. One of my transgendered Facebook friends repeatedly got her profile deleted because she wasn't using her real name. That keeps the predators and other nonsense to a minimum. And unlike in MySpace, you can't tamper with your profile to make it a creative assault on the eyes and ears. They did recently allow users to create "applications" that one can put on their profile, but most people don't want to clutter their profiles with them anyway.

Ack--what happened to the little boxes around each person's comments?
And this tiny little comment space is ridiculous!

Stop trying to fix what ain't broke!

Please.

I use del.icio.us extensively - the bookmark capabilities in my browser just aren't up to the job! I'll definitely be using these to keep track of AT posts either for my own reference, or maybe to post them for my friends on Facebook.

Alana,

what do you mean "little boxes"? We haven't changed the commenting interface this week, just added social bookmarks....

confused....

Sorry, Maxwell.

Must have been a temporary glitch with IE or something. The space between comments usually has a line through it. I perceived that as a "box" round each persons comments. (Funny my eye should invent two more lines where there aren't any, but there it is).

Anyway, those lines were missing yesterday--and in this thread only, by the way. They are back now. And so is the larger comment box. Hooray! (It was about two or three lines deep and about 25 chracters wide yesterday).

I didn't mean to cause alarm. I was overly frustrated with trying to pick out paint colours, actually, and took it out on what I thought was an (adverse) permanent change.

Based on the comments here, I would say the chicklets are a good call because they'll open up a whole new audience for you! Your current readers are already here and don't need to search digg for your posts.

That said, some of these sites (like digg) are pretty techy and skew heavily male. Consider adding one for sk*rt which is specifically for women and in fact has a whole parenting/family category.