So many choices!

As I mentioned yesterday, the latest BIP is encouraging me to join a social networking/media site and use it to promote my blog and build connections. I decided to do some research into the different social media outlets available to me, as there are so many. Here are the ones I thought sounded most interesting:-

1. Twitter - Twitter is a text based social media site, often called the 'SMS of the Internet'. People communicate with 140 character long messages or 'tweets', which are updated during the day (think of the Facebook status bar and nothing else). It sounds like it wouldn't be too time consuming to take part in and a lot of agents and publishers appear to be using it.

2. Helium - Writers are paid for contributing articles which are then peer reviewed, the highest rated articles receiving the most money. As recently as last month a range of social networking features have been added to the existing writing and reviewing functions. I am already a member of Helium (a very absent member) and I found it quite time consuming to write and review articles that I would only get pennies for when I could be writing stories for bigger paying markets, but perhaps I missed the point and should give it another go.

3. Friendster - A social networking site focused on helping people make new friends. One of the first of these sites, it predates Myspace and Facebook (although they seem to have a lot of features in common with it). I like the idea of the fan profiles you can set up to draw more attention to yourself.

4. Ning - A place where you can make up your very own social networking site within the easy to use templates of the Ning banner. Sounds fun - but what would my social networking site be about?

5. Digg - People share stories (from the web) and vote on the ones they like (dig) or dislike (bury). The most digged (dug?) stories every day are displayed on the front page of the site.