Some visitors to the BBC News website will have noticed a little box appearing at the bottom of stories with a range of social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit.

With a simple click of a button, you can now share a BBC story with your friends. It explains, for one, why so many BBC stories are appearing on my friends’ pages in Facebook.

Writing on the BBC Editors’ blog, Paul Brannan readily admits that other sites already offer such tools. He also explains the rationale behind the choice of social sites:

There are a huge number of social bookmarking sites out there. The five sites we’ve chosen – Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon – are those which we believe are going to be most useful to our audience. We’d be interested in what you think, though, so please do let us know.

As one comment on the posting points out, the same buttons are not available on the Editors’ Blog, though Brannan replied that they will be coming soon.