If users are engaging with content through social bookmarking sites like Digg, reddit and stubleupon then it should be as easy as possible for them to do so. ShareThis offers a great solution.

ShareThis is elegant, compact, easy to use and does everything it needs to, it’s widget design at it’s best. I suppose if a system like this is going to be truly effective then it needs to be on every single article on every site. You can get a browser plugin to make this possible but only a certain sort of person (one interested in technology most likely) who is going to install it.

ShareThis makes a WordPress plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend”

sharethis.com

ShareThis is a great tool for individuals and brands to leverage their engaged users to virally distributed content for them.

If Microsoft, Mozilla or Apple build a sharing tool into their browser by default then systems like this will have a massive impact on the volume of user recommendations made and through which channels they are made.

User recommendation is going to be so important for the web in the future. Users own the content so much more now that we are moving into an increasingly shared social space.