Social media sharing tools were added to the Newsroom Web site of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints yesterday. They enable visitors to the site to easily share Newsroom content on other sites like Digg, Delic.io.us, Facebook, Reddit, Newsvine, Google Bookmarks, and StumbleUpon.
The move was prompted by requests from Newsroom visitors and by the increasing popularity of social news sharing and bookmarking sites on the Internet.
The Digg icon now appearing on Newsroom pages will allow visitors to add specific stories to their Digg account, a kind of filing system of Internet stories that the user is interested in. Others searching for information on that subject will see that three or 3,000 people, for example, have previously “dug” the story, helping them decide if it has been useful to others before them.
The Facebook link lets users add a particular story to their own account, allowing visitors to their own site to see what they have been reading lately.
In addition to these and other social media features, an e-mail subscription function on the home page of Newsroom was also added. This allows subscribers to receive email notifications of new postings on the site and then to forward stories to others.
Newsroom has offered Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to journalists and other regular visitors to the site for some time. The e-mail subscription is another way those interested in Mormon-related news can get updates regularly in their e-mail inbox.