More yummy tech stuff

I’ve been charged with helping Feministing evolve into the wonderful world of Web 2.0, and you might notice a few changes that we are just pleased as punch to share with you all.
First, there’s a set of links at the end of each post now where you — yes, you! — can save your favorite Feministing items and help spread the word to the rest of the world. Second, there’s a link to a service called “Spotlight” where you can send posts right to local and national media outlets.
What? Why? How? OK, here’s a little primer…

There’s this idea called “social bookmarking” that’s all the rage right now. You know how when you’re web browsing, and there’s a menu item called “bookmarks” or “favorites” where you can save things you like? When you click that, it just saves it to your own computer. What if you wanted to save things between your work computer and your home computer, or easily pass things on to friends?
Enter social bookmarking. My personal favorite for this kind of use is del.icio.us. You can create a username where you’ll save all your own stuff, and be able to “tag” it with keywords so that you can find it easier later on. Then (if you want) you can give your bookmarks URL to all your friends, and they’ll be able to see what you’re bookmarking. (There’s also a “private” feature that’s quite handy.)
But say you want to recommend a particular post to a wider audience, something you think everyone should be reading. That’s where recommendation services like digg and StumbleUpon come in; I’ll use digg for this example, but it pretty much works the same for all the services. After you create a username, you can “digg” a post by clicking the link at the bottom of it. This submits it to the digg site, and then the more people that digg it, the more popular it’ll become on the digg site (because it’ll start appearing on the “popular” pages after a certain number of diggs). And then it’ll have a better chance of getting out to people who might not otherwise know (or care, haha) about feminist issues. So, these are great outreach tools for everybody, and we strongly encourage you to use them.
Last, but definitely not least, is the new Spotlight link. This is a new service built by a guy name Mark who has devised a way for you, dear reader, to be able to send Feministing posts to your local and national media. Simply click on the “Spotlight” link at the end of each post, and then choose the media you want to send to. Then you can write your message to them, and voila! Media activism accomplished.
There are some guidelines for using Spotlight, though, that we’d like you to take notice of:

• Please be polite and professional! No name-calling, and stick to the facts as much as possible.
• The people receiving these messages are real people, too. We want to influence them, not alienate them.
• Spotlight is a serious tool and not just a toy, so please use wisely.
• Any problems with the tool can be reported to help at thespotlightproject dot org

Whew. I think that’s it on the tech front. Oh, you RSS readers, you should now see some links at the bottom of each post, too, so that you can join in the fun. Yippie!