Do you constantly have co-workers, friends and family sending you interesting and fascinating links, leaving you asking where they find them? Do you wish that you had the chops to be a promiscuous link propagator, letting everyone know about the funny hamster dancing Star Wars baby with a bad translation?

Just a few sites are all you need to get the best of the current memes, giving you a lot of source material for endless link emails. Soon enough you'll be a link Jedi, saying "That's ancient news. I saw that three hours ago" to coworkers.

http://www.slashdot.org

Slashdot is a technology focused site that's been around for some time, and it still holds a lot of influence (Slashdot's demise has been greatly exaggerated). While Slashdot is split into sections (for instance a section dedicate to Apache), anything meme worthy will appear on the front page as well.

Slashdot content generally comes from the users (including anonymous cowards) submitting "stories" with links of interest. Stories often consist of multiple links, sometimes just a Google search. A small editorial group at Slashdot selects from the submissions those that they think would be interesting to the community, either relegating it to a single section, or cross-posting to the front page. Due to this process, and a queue of sometimes dubious "news", Slashdot tends to be one of the slower disseminators of fast-spreading information, and you generally won't find chest-beating "we're great!" type stories.

One of Slashdot's greatest assets is the well-proven commenting system, with a user-moderated scoring of each post from -1 (usually indicative of a troll) to 5 (either a great karma-whore pandering to the group think, or a truly insightful post): You can usually glean some additional information, or at least get the lay of the land, by reading comments above a threshold of 3 or so.

http://www.digg.com

Digg is a relative newcomer that, while supposedly technology focused, is more often than not covering general interest links. It has gained mindshare very quickly.

Similar to Slashdot, Digg is split into sections (for instance hardware), again with the concept of a front page containing the best of all of the sections.

Also similar to Slashdot, Digg stories are courtesy of the users. Unlike Slashdot, though, all of the stories are posted immediately, and there is no editorial control at all (beyond dealing with user-reported spam/abuse type submissions). Instead it is up to the users of Digg to promote (by "Digging") those stories that they think are good, or ignore (or reporting as spam/abuse/etc) those that they think aren't. Web 2.0 content democracy in action, although there have been high-profile instances of people gaming the system, automatically creating hundreds of users to digg their own submissions right to the front page. With its rise in popularity, the number of spam stories on Digg has dramatically increased as well.

Due to the lack of editor-lag time-delay, Digg is a good place to find very quickly spreading information. Unfortunately it also suffers from a severe case of group-think, and it's pretty evident at this point that quite a few content providers and bloggers know exactly what to write to elicit a hearty digging: Many of the "front page" entries these days are clannish "Digg versus Someone Else" type stories, and more and more it's focusing on itself rather than the original goal, becoming primarily a banner for the bored to rally behind. Several highly-ranked front page stories have been completely ignorant, mistake-laden misdirections, but given that anyone can Digg, with no proof of any effort (like actually reading the linked site), they get promoted to the front page.

The comment system on Digg is truly terrible, and the general quality of comments is even worse.

Despite all of that, occasionally Digg is good for wildfire spreading news, and can serve as an entertaining diversion.

http://www.reddit.com

Reddit makes no claims to being a technology focused site, and the links are general interest. It has been gaining popularity, albeit nowhere near the levels of Slashdot and Digg.

Using a relatively minimalist interface, Reddit is similar to Digg in that it lets users submit links which are immediately published, and the user community can vote up/down stories, possibly right to the front page. To the best of my knowledge, Reddit has no categorization, and instead is just a lump of links with minimalist titles.

Reddit's comment system is barely used at all, but it's quite a good foundation if a community did evolve.

Reddit definitely needs some work, and some major gaps in the platform and infrastructure are readily apparent. Nonetheless it's a great place to scan for interesting new links, even if you do have to go by a barely useful title to decide if you want to follow it. I expect great things of Reddit when they start doing associative analysis. e.g. I don't care what every artificial account and loyal herd member thinks, but I would like if it could correlate people who "think like me", giving me a personalized frontpage based upon the selections of people who've shown similar tastes to me.

http://del.icio.us/

Delicious is a community bookmarking site where users can host their bookmarks (presuming they aren't something they want to be private), categorizing them through keywords.

Through the power of numbers, the growing trends and popular links can easily be determined. You can even look at what links are popular for a given keyword, for instance concerning Microsoft or SQL or .NET.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

StumbleUpon really doesn't fit in the same category, but instead works as a toolbar for your browser in which you can thumbs up or down pages, as well as provide page reviews, as you're browsing. You can then "Stumble" around to interesting pages that other users enjoyed. Interesting tool, although it seems that a large percentage of stumbles lead to humorous Flash movies.

http://www.plastic.com/

Plastic isn't really a meme site or link propagator at all. Originally the work of a couple of http://www.suck.com (which was a great site) alumni, Plastic is like Slashdot but with a better community, more editorial original content (rather than just link propagation), and a good comment system. You won't find link-of-the-days at Plastic, but if you just want some interesting discussion it's a good place to look.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/

Kuro5hin is again very similar to Plastic, which is again very similar to Slashdot. Again it focuses more on original content and commentary over link propagation.

http://www.boingboing.net/

Slashdot run through a blog. You'll find many of the same stories that you find on the other meme propagation sites, but often with a nicer package.

http://www.technorati.com/pop/

Technorati's "popular web topics". Most blog content is just someone repeating what other blogs have said (and so on), so Technorati senses that and makes a popular listing. Seems suspiciously like a convenient place to put some affiliate links for books and movies.

http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/

The Technorati popular blog list -- Know who's getting the link love right now.

There are others, such as Fark, SomethingAwful, among many, however they're often not safe for work, nor are they appropriate for the sort of memes that you'd want to mass email to all of your friends.

Hopefully this list has provided a good starting point in making you a meme kung-fu champion, emailing and IMing the interesting links faster than your friends.