With so much content on the web, it’s nice to be able to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to help us discover noteworthy links and weed through all the stuff (and fluff) out there.

For designers who enjoy social media — or anyone interested in design news and resources — there are a number of sites and services for you to check out and participate in. Here are nine noteworthy social news and bookmarking sites aimed at designers and design enthusiasts.

1. DesignBump

This social news site’s interface will be familiar to those who use DiggDigg, Redditreddit.com, or MixxMixx. The concept is simple: Get enough votes on your links and it will be promoted to the front page.

DesignBump currently has over 16,000 users, with some famous design bloggers among their active participants.

2. Image Spark

This free social bookmarking service puts a unique twist on the format: Instead of bookmarking web pages that you find, you bookmark images. Popular bookmarked images are displayed in a gallery-style format so that site users can see them for visual inspiration on their own projects.

3. design:related

design:related is a community site that seeks to bring together designers from many disciplines. You can set up a portfolio on their site, share what’s inspiring you creatively, and submit news that members can vote on.

The site is a perfect spot for inspiration-seekers, and those looking to stay up to speed on important industry news in a single location.

4. DesignFloat

Established in 2007, DesignFloat is one of the first vote-to-promote social news-sharing sites dedicated specifically to designers.

The site has a broad range of categories for users to submit links to, including Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Industrial Design, as well as design-related topics like Photography. Each category has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in case you’re only interested in specific topics.

5. Graphic Design Links

Graphic Design Links is another destination for creatives looking for socially promoted info. To help users see the most popular topics being submitted to the site, they have a Tag Cloud page.

Among the site’s submission categories are Illustration, 3D, Typography, and Web DesignWeb Design.

6. The Web Blend

The Web Blend only has about 1,500 members, making it a comparatively small community — but smaller isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Some of its top users are popular design bloggers, such as Jad Limcaco of Designer Informer and Sneh Roy of Little Box Of Ideas. This smaller community gives members a chance to interact directly with some of their favorite content creators.

7. zaBox

zaBox covers a wide range of design industry news, resources, and tutorials. Like most social news sites, a story’s popularity is determined by the number of people voting for it.

It also offers bloggers the ability to integrate zaBox into their site, including a button for voting and submitting their stories to the web service.

8. FFFFOUND!

Visual bookmarking is a popular activity among designers. Collecting images for reference and inspiration later on can get you out of a creative funk in a jiffy.

FFFFOUND! is a web service where users can post and share images they’ve discovered on the web. The website is intelligent: It recommends images you might also like based on your bookmarking history.

9. Pixel Groovy

The amount of graphic design tutorials on the web is overwhelming. Pixel Groovy helps point you to ones that its community members like.

The community-driven site gives editorial control to their users, empowering them with the ability to vote on tutorials that they deem worthwhile to be published and indexed on the site.

Bonus: General Social News and Bookmarking Sites

Aside from websites that are geared towards designers, major social news and bookmarking sites also have strong design categories that are worth checking out.

• Top Design News, Videos and Images on Digg: Digg’s design topic has great social news and resources, though occasionally, unrelated stories do appear in this feed.
• Design on Reddit: Reddit’s Design subreddit has over 12,000 readers, and also allows for design critique requests.
• Popular Design Bookmarks on Delicious: DeliciousDelicious features plenty of links bookmarked with the design tag.

More design resources from Mashable:

- 10 Essential Design Tools for Social Media Pros
- 8 of the Best Chrome Extensions for Web Designers
- 10 Fantastic Places for Finding Designers Online
- 5 Fantastic Free Tools to Showcase Your Portfolio
- HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog

Download The Configuring Onlywire Video

What is social bookmarking? It is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. And, because your bookmarks are online, you can easily share them with friends. And other people who happen to use a particular word or phrase you used wile tagging your Social Bookmark will come across your site.

Diving traffic to your site is one of the important skills you must develop in order to be successful at online marketing. It does not matter how you are trying to make your money online;  Multi Level Marketing, Blogging or Affiliate Marketing, they all require people to come visit and see what you have to offer.

The best way I know to do this is via Social Bookmarking.

There are several programs you can use for this. There are both free and paid versions available; one that stands above the rest is OnlyWire, and it is FREE.  This little program, which you install as a browser plugin, allows you to publish a summary of your site article or Landing Page to more than 45 Social Bookmarking Sites.

I use it every time I post an article as well as to drive traffic to my Landing Page.

To get started download the video I put together which guides you through the process of getting this little gem up and running.

Related posts:

1. How To Draw Website Traffic From Social Bookmarking Websites Part-3
2. 9 Essential Social News and Bookmarking Sites for Designers
3. Web Site Traffic – Secrets to Boost Web Site Traffic