Unless you've been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you've no doubt heard of social bookmarking.

But do you really know what social bookmarking is?

According to Wikipedia:

"Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others."

One of the more interesting of the various social bookmarking sites is Digg.com.

Digg is a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles.

It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Users can share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to them!

Submitting stories is easy. Once you've registered and signed in, simply click on "submit a story" and enter the URL of the story you would like to submit.

Then fill out a title, description, and category for the story. Should you encounter a potential duplicate, please digg the original story and do not submit a duplicate entry.

Once a story is submitted by a user it is instantly posted in the Upcoming stories section. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the homepage. To help promote stories to the homepage, simply visit the Upcoming stories section and digg stories you think are cool. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, surpass 24 hours, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the Upcoming stories section.

Digg works because a large group of people actively digg (promote) good stories and report (remove bad stories). Since digg's content is user-driven, it is up to you to contribute.

So why should you care about social bookmarking?

In a word - traffic.

Sites like Digg and Delicio.us have huge numbers of users - many of whom are potential prospects for your products and services.

In closing, I have seen the future of the Internet, and its name is social bookmarking!