In the old days, people used to share articles by pulling out a pair of scissors, clipping the newspaper and mailing the article in an envelope to family, colleagues or friends. Nowadays, there's a much easier way -- one which is even easier than e-mail. It's called social bookmarking, and uses the Web's most popular community sites.

By sharing SPIEGEL links, you can flash your credentials as a true world citizen who goes beyond the usual suspects to stay informed.

Heck, if you're on Facebook, you can even post SPIEGEL articles on your profile -- demonstrating your intelligence and greatly enhancing your prospects for finding a date and other people as smart and savvy as you.

Share. It's the polite thing to do.

It's really easy, too. To share a SPIEGEL article using your favorite bookmarking site, simply click on the "Share" button located in the center of the page near the top of the screen (see photo).

Though each service is free, most require a simple sign-up precedure before you can get started sharing your links.

Here's a brief description of each of the services, information on how to use them and links you can follow to register and find out more about the sites:

Digg

With Digg, users share articles by submitting links. Then things get a bit more interesting: the Digg audience can vote, giving a story the "thumbs up" or the "thumbs down," causing it to rise or sink within the site's rankings. The most popular stories wind up on Digg's home and topic pages.

To register, go to: http://digg.com/register 

For more information about Digg, go to http://digg.com/about 

Reddit

Reddit allows users to submit news articles and other online content. Like Digg, it also has a user rating system. But it also goes a step further by building a user profile and recommending articles based on a user's interests.

To register, go to: http://reddit.com/login 

For more information about Reddit, go to: http://reddit.com/help/faq 

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon uses "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" ratings to form collaborative opinions about an article. When using StumbleUpon, you will only see pages recommended by friends and other "stumblers" who have similar interests.

Note that StumbleUpon users need to download a toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

To register and download your toolbar, go to: http://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php 

To learn more about StumbleUpon, visit: http://www.stumbleupon.com/about.html 

Fark

Fark is an irreverent news aggregator and edited social networking news site with an extremely lively personality. Like other social bookmarking sites, Fark also allows users to vote on stories.

To register, go to: http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/newuser.pl 

For more information, visit: http://www.fark.com/farq/ 

Newsvine

Newsvine uses a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account the number of votes an article gets, how many people read the article, the freshness of the news, and several other factors to determine its ranking. Users can also tag links with keywords.

To register, go to: http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/new/user 

For more information, visit: http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/help/faq_reading 

Del.icio.us

At its most basic level, del.icio.us allows users to save their bookmarks online. Del.icio.us also gives users the ability to "tag" their bookmarks with descriptive category names. So if you want to link to a story about Knut the baby polar bear or Angela Merkel, you can include descriptive tags with those names.

As members of a social bookmarking community, del.icio.us users can also see how many other people have bookmarked the same pages, and they can look at those users' bookmark collections to find other interesting online content.

To register, go to: http://del.icio.us/register 

For more information about Del.icio.us, go to: http://del.icio.us/about/ 

Google Bookmarks

If you are a registered user of Google's personalized homepage, e-mail and other services, you can also save bookmarks and label them with keywords.

Create a personalized Google account here: http://www.google.com/ig 

Find out more about Google Boomarks here: http://www.google.com/ig 

Yahoo! Bookmarks

Users of Yahoo's "MyYahoo" feature can save bookmarks to their personal page, tag them with keywords, and share them with other Yahoo users.

Sign up for a personal Yahoo account here: http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/my_init