Stating upfront that Digg is my networking site of choice, here are a couple of other sites that are good as well.
Adding the StumbleUpon toolbar, makes it easy to submit articles and add to my profile (to keep articles on-file) that I have interest in. That's a pretty cool feature. However, word-to-the-wise when you're adding the toolbar...be sure that you don't have any tabs up that you are in need of keeping track of because you'll lose those as your Internet will re-boot (not your complete computer system...just the Internet, i.e., Internet Explorer).
del.icio.us seems, thus far, to be fairly easy to use. Interaction with my del.icio.us network seems to be the most difficult part. Posting items on their site is fairly easy. Adding people to your network is fairly easy.
Networking is a necessity in marketing your blog, increasing its traffic and attractiveness to advertisers. Additionally, there is not a "one-size-fits-all" networking site. Try a few sites to feel out which one(s) work best for your blog topic and traffic. It may take time to analyze which site(s) will be most beneficial and therefore I recommend using Google Analytics or Feedburner to analyze where your traffic is coming from.
What is the definition of "Ping (Blogging)"? This comes from Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_blog
"Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.) That is, the tool sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.
Open ping servers, like VeriSign's Weblogs.com and Yahoo!'s blo.gs, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them.
Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material. A few of the blog aggregators that can be pinged directly include:
BulkFeeds, FeedBurner, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Technorati, and Yahoo
In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.
There is a conflict of interest here between the blogger--who wants his new post to get the widest possible publicity as fast as possible--and the web-service owner--who wants his search engine or aggregator to have new blog posts long before anyone else. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers. As the blogosphere has grown, other ping "services" have cropped up, such as Pingoat and BlogFlux Pinger."
Each time you post a new article, be sure to use at least one of the ping sites to register your new post. This will drive traffic to your site and increase your rating on Technorati and Alexa.
Sources:
www.technorati.com
www.alexa.com
www.del.icio.us.com
www.stumbleupon.com
www.digg.com
www.feedburner.com
www.google.com/analytics/
en.wikipedia.org
