Social bookmarking is a way for people to save links to things they find interesting, categorized them, save them and share them. Most services use folksonomy to let people organize their links and RSS or other subscription services to share them with others.
Social News sites take the same idea and use it as a way to calculate the most relevant things being discussed on the internet during a given time frame. If enough people bookmark a site, it can get promoted higher in a listing of news stories. Digg is a prominent example of this. Newsvine is another variation that tailors news more to the topics that you like that other people have tagged.
What to use social bookmarking for:
- Bookmark things you find interesting
- Share your bookmarks
- Read other people's bookmarks
- Make it easy for other people to bookmark your content
Bookmark Services of note
Social Bookmarking
Del.ico.us
Ma.gnolia
Google Bookmarks
Social News
Digg
Reddit
Stumbleupon
Newsvine
Make it easy to share
A good way to leverage these bookmarking services is to make it easy for people to bookmark / digg your content. Put links to bookmarks content at the bottom of posts.
Bookmarking can also be added to the bottom of RSS feeds. Feedburner offers a service called FeedFlare that achieves this easily and takes care of some of the technical aspects of it.
Be sure to not go overboard:
There is also a wordpress plugin, BetterFeed that can be configured to achieve many of the same things without using Feedburner.