Cool Tools Friday - ShareThis Adds Digg Tracking

There are about 6 billion social media and social networking tools. Perhaps that number is a bit of an exaggeration, but what is not an exaggeration is how many emails I receive regarding cool tools (either new or potentially forgotten) and how many of these tools that I accidentally fall across each week. Since there aren't enough hours in the day to write about every single one in detail, I bring you "Cool Tools Friday" -- a weekly blog with quick snapshots on one or more cool tools that recently struck my fancy. Starting with just one this week:

ShareThis has been a favorite feature of bloggers for some time, given it's ease-of-install for publishers and ease-of-use for consumers of digital information. Its Social Web Tab provides a JavaScript one-click tool that allows readers to quickly share content via social networking sites, social bookmarking or even P2P applications. For publishers, ShareThis creates back-end tracking and analytics reports.

So what's new and cool? This week the company announced that it has added Digg tracking to the Social Web Tab. While ShareThis has had a quick link to Digg (as well as del.icio.us and StumbleUpon) for some time there really was no easy way for publishers or readers to know if a particular article has yet been Dugg or just how many Diggs it earned.

This is helpful to the general blog reader who may want to Digg a story but doesn't have the time nor inclination to be the first one to fill out Digg's forms. If he or she sees the story has already been Dugg then there's increased confidence that the vote can be cast with just one click. From a publisher's perspective, this gives him or her a better shot at getting blog posts up on Digg because of the easy access for subscribers.

Have a cool social media tool that you want me to check out? Email socialmediatools SHIFT 2 gmail DOT com.