What the heck are those icons for?

[Nicko]

Hey All,

What another feature on ChefTalk.com? Yep it is true we have added another amazing, cool, and fun filled feature. So a few members have asked what the heck are the icons at the bottom of the posts. Allow me to explain.

In a nutshell what these icons allow you to do is more or less tell other people on the web about a topic of discussion that you find particularly interesting. Reading between the lines it is a great way for you to tell others about ChefTalk.com and the great community we have here. Please read below to get the details on each website, they are actually quite handy. I would recommend that if you have not tried Digg.com or del.icio.us you should definately check them out. As for Furl.net and technorati I am still learning my way around them.

Digg.com
Click on this icon allows you to add this bookmark to Digg.com. What is digg? Well here is a brief description:

How Digg Works

Digg is a digital media democracy. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.

1. Discover
   
   Discover media online. Find an article, video, or podcast online and submit it to Digg.com. Your submission will immediately appear in “Upcoming Stories,” where other members can find it and, if they like it, Digg it.
   Get popular. Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category. If it becomes one of the most popular, it qualifies as a “Top 10” (If a submission doesn’t receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out of the “Upcoming” section.)
   Discover media on Digg. Visit the “Upcoming” section to discover recently added news, videos, and podcasts. Track submissions as they come in with Swarm or Stack, our realtime Flash visualization tools. Or use Spy to watch the titles and descriptions as they roll down the page.

del.icio.us
Clicking on this icon allows you to submit this post or topic to your bookmarks at del.icio.us. What is del.icio.us? Here is what the about us says:

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.
You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved -- which is made easy with tags.
All you need is a browser and an internet connection. Sound good? Here's how to get started. If you'd like to find out more, keep reading.

Technorati
Clicking on this icon adds the thread or post to the technorati website. Technorati tracks blog posts (in a nut shell) but here is what Technorati is all about:

About Technorati

Currently tracking 72.3 million blogs
Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”
But it all started with blogs. A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.
Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.
On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
Technorati. Who's saying what. Right now.

FURL.com
Lastly clicking the little orange "F" will send the post/thread to Furl.net. What is furl you say well here is what they say they do:

About Furl...

Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items.

Furl recommends new Web pages that may interest you, guided by the sites you've already "Furled," or saved. Furl also offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web. Send a daily email newsletter of links to friends and colleagues, use Furl to generate RSS feeds for your links, or integrate them quickly and easily into an existing Web site.