As we mentioned earlier this year, we’ve been working on adding cool new features that will enable you, our users, to make your e-Portfolio more engaging and dynamic. We started by adding a Twitter module so you can pull your latest tweets into your e-Portfolio. Now I’d like to introduce you to our latest addition: social bookmarking.

As you may know, the internet has developed far beyond the original bulletin board services and AOL chat rooms – it has become a network of people and social interactions, sharing breaking news, how-to’s, and inspiring artwork. We’re excited that people are using our services to share your creativity with other users at your school. We’re even more excited that now others can more easily pass on your e-Portfolios.

Let’s say you want to create an e-Portfolio showcasing some paintings you made over the summer and share it with all your friends and family. Normally, you would create the e-Portfolio, add the artwork, and begin the task of posting links and sending emails or instant messages. Since we want you to avoid as much hassle as possible, adding the Social Bookmarks module to a page in your e-Portfolio gives you one-click publishing to your favorite social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg.

By adding the Social Bookmarks module to your e-Portfolio, you’re also letting other people post your e-Portfolio page to their favorite social media sites. When someone likes something you’ve done, they can tell all their friends, and you will get traffic back to your e-Portfolio. The major search engines like Google and Yahoo! also use these kinds of social links to figure out how relevant or popular your site is, so by letting your visitors easily tell their friends about your e-Portfolio, you’re also boosting your ranking in search engines.