There are dozens of social bookmark systems out there. Digg, del.icio.us, Spurl, and so on and so forth. Upwards to forty. Each encourages you to tag your articles and submit them, and each suggests that you'll get dozens of hits.

Well, the fact is, social bookmarking systems aren't all that universal. Most have a niche market. Digg with technical stuff, MySpace with music, and so on. If you don't fit in that niche, your articles are not likely to earn a lot of hits.

That has been my experience, with one exception -- Facebook. I created a Facebook account, and discovered the number of people who use Facebook and who read my blog overlap considerably. Every day I get one or two invitations to become a Facebook "friend". Facebook also seems to be the place where professional columnists maintain a presence. Facebook also allows you to connect your feed to your page, essentially allowing your Facebook page to mirror your site.

So I've decided to cull down my social bookmarking shortcuts down to one.

That icon will appear at the bottom of my posts and, when clicked, will take you to a page prefilled with information about the post, and inviting you to send the link to one or more Facebook friends.

You can find the code for doing this here if you are a blogger looking to do something similar.

If you use other social bookmarking schemes and would like to see shortcuts re-enabled, let me know. But based on what I'm seeing, providing a Facebook shortcut is what my readership would find most useful.

If you don't have a Facebook account, you can create one here. And if you in Facebook, but not my friend, send me an invite.

And please feel free to share my posts far and wide.