Google is trying in so many ways to catch up on the sharing front. It wants you to share more links through Google properties such as Gmail, Google Reader, Google News, and Google Buzz. Today, it is adding a new sharing feature to Google Bookmarks. You can now organize bookmarks into lists and share those lists.

For instance, I created this list of stories about Google’s new approach to China (or is it a retreat?). It is a public list. People can follow the list, in case I add more links, or copy the list to their own bookmarks. The list is shareable via email or as a link. The list’s creator can move items up and down the list or create new sections. It is a pretty basic way to group links together, but seems like it could come in handy.

To be honest, I almost completely forgot about Google Bookmarks. In fact, the last time I used it before today was in 2005. But it is integrated into the Google Toolbar and actually gets a lot of usage.

Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

Bookmarking is done via a popup from the toolbar that allows naming of the bookmark and any number of tags. A bookmark can be edited as well.

Google Bookmarks have no “social” or sharing feature. And while it is disappointing that bookmarks are not available yet for Firefox, I will say that the interface in IE is excellent. In addition to setting tags, users can access bookmarks directly from the toolbar via a drop down menu containing chosen tags.

I’ve been very hard on Google products recently (and their product strategy). And while I could criticize them for releasing this only in IE, I won’t. This is a great bookmarking product, interesting features can be added down the road, and many users will find it useful.

More from Nik Cubrilovic and Niall Kennedy.