The web is a buzz with social media.  Social media consists of different types of social sites – bookmarking, pictures, conversations, and plenty other ways that people interact on the web.  Here are three social sites you can use to  bookmark, connect, and share stumbles.

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking site where you bookmark sites you find on the web.  Whether to revisit or use for research, delicious also allows you to tag the bookmarks you save, as well as share directly with others.  All bookmarks are public by default.  There’s also a checkbox that will let you keep bookmarks private.

You can create a network of people who share bookmarks with one another.  You can also subscribe to tags, so when people tag web pages with the tag you subscribed to, the bookmarks will show up on your subscriptions page.

When you add people to your network you’ll have the opportunity to share bookmarks directly with them.  Delicious offers a button that you place on your browser’s toolbar, so when you find a page you want to bookmark you can use the button on your toolbar to quickly add that page to your bookmarks at delicious.  When you bookmark a page, you’ll also have the opportunity to send that page directly to someone in your network.

If you’re a blogger who is looking for traffic from delicious, you can update your public profile with a link to your blog.  People who check out your profile will see a link to your blog and possibly visit your blog.

That’s just a snippet of what delicious offers.  Go create an account and add me to your network if you’re interested in the same things I am here at my blog.  My delicious profile is here.

Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect is a new social networking tool from Google.  As a website owner or blogger,  Google Friend Connect can help bring people to your site.  In their words:

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps site owners easily provide social features for their visitors. Users gain the ability to sign in to, make friends on, and interact with your site, making it more social and more dynamic. No programming expertise is required: just paste a snippet of code that we provide onto your site.

As a user visiting friend connected sites, you can become members of sites and interact with other members who share your interests. You can also invite your friends other social networks to join the community.

Google Friend Connect allows you to provide a widget at your blog or website where people can sign in and join your Google Friends network.  Once joined, people can invite others to visit your blog to see what’s going on.  In turn, you can find people to friend and view their Google profile.

You’ll want to create or update your Google Profile to take advantage of sharing and promoting others as well yourself through the network.  Google Profile is a place where you provide basic information about yourself as well as links to your blog(s) and other social networking sites.

I’ve provided the Google Friend Connect widget on my blog, please join in. There’s a lot more to Google Friend Connect.

SumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a website where you can randomly stumble-upon or channel surf websites and blogs.  By clicking on a button that says Stumble!, different websites and blogs will be presented to you randomly.

This can be highly addictive because there’s so much out there on the web, that to have a button you click on, and websites are served up to you, makes it easy to browse the web, as well as intriguing at what will be returned.

You can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down on sites that are returned to you.  While you give thumbs up to the various sites that StumbleUpon present you, the StumbleUpon search mechanism learns what you like by using the thumbs up.

As a blogger, StumbleUpon can you bring you bursts of traffic to your blog.  If you write articles or create videos, or photography, StumbleUpon is a greeat way to get you blog in front of a bunch of eyeballs.

You can also stumble by category as well, this will present websites with video only and pictures only, for example.  There’s quite a few ways to filter the type of websites that are presented to you by StumbleUpon.

Add me as a friend (here’s my StumbleUpon profile) and provide your StumbleUpon profile in the comments so others can add you or subscribe to your StumbleUpon favorites.

Subscribe to my blog and we’ll take a closer look at these social sites as well as others, and how they can help you to promote your blog or website.