Social bookmarking has had a great deal of growth in the past several years, with sites like (loosely categorized as Social Bookmarking sites) StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Digg and Furl leading the way. These services are great for exchanging, highlighthing and discovering web sites. It was only a matter of time before the same paradigm was applied to picking stocks.

DigStock is using the basic format that Digg popularized - but with a good number of additions. Just like Digg, DigStock allow you to submitt stories that are voted on by the website membership. The popular stories appear on the front page. The user can also rank stock and indexes - give readers an idea of what other stocks people are interested in. This feature seems to need some work, as it is a little slow. A great deal of caution should be exercised when looking at what people have voted up and voted down. Bookmarking systems are prone to manipulation and DigStock is no exception. They also have a specific trader blog dig section with stories from stock market related blogs - again, allowing you to vote on those stories.

Another site that is in an open Alpha test - socialPicks - describes itself as a place to “Share your stock picks and research.” They seem to be leaning more on the tracking and validation of picks by individuals - kind of like a universe of amateur stock analysts. If it sounds interesting, go over and sign up for an invitation to test out the system.

I just saw a post by Jason over at InvestorGeeks where he gives his First Impressions of SocialPicks and StockTickr - which introduced me to another site I was not aware of - StockTickr.