ahrfoundation.org and social networking

ahrfoundation.org is a little over five months old now, with the first post published October 31st, 2007. The site receives an average of 5000 hits a day, but I’d like to expand its readership, one way to go about it is social networking.

There’s a toolbar at the bottom of each post on individual post pages, but many people may not be aware of what social networking is, and how it works.

What is social networking?

Social networking is a term used to describe the use of specialized online services for communities with shared interests to connect. Users can create profiles for themselves and share websites, blogs, bookmarks and information with others.

Each social networking site is a little different, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of sites catering to different markets of people.

Technorati

Technorati is a site which tracks more than a hundred million blogs, including ahrfoundation.org. From there you can view the latest posts, as well as see who’s linking to the site and track reactions to individual posts, and even make it a favourite.

Digg

Digg tracks the popularity of an article via user-submitted recommendations called “diggs”. I’ve added a Digg This link at the top of each post, if you like it, consider digging it and recommending it to others. My account name is ahrfoundation.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging service allowing users to send posts of up to 140 characters called “tweets”. Depending on an individual’s settings, you can follow other users, reply to them, and send public or private tweets of your own – it can even act as an IM service. For Firefox users there’s a great plugin called TwitterFox that makes this much easier.

I’m still getting the hang of things, but I’m on there as ahrfoundation, and you can see the three most recent items on the right side bar here.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service which allows you to store, share and recommend bookmarks. I’m new to this too, and I’m there as ahrfoundation again. I don’t have very many bookmarks yet (actually, I’ve only added ahrfoundation.org so far…) – recommendations would be most welcome!

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is another social bookmarking site that allows users to rate the a site with either a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. Once again, Firefox has a plugin which makes stumbling a snap – and even allows you to click on Stumble! to check out random sites.

As a change (and also because I signed up several years ago), my user name here is plutopsyche.

So, those are the social networking sites I’m a part of – most of which I’m still learning how to navigate to some extent. Which ones do you use? (And what’s your user name, so I can friend you!)

Psyche is the editor of ahrfoundation.org and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).

Psyche's website is http://www.ahrfoundation.org.