What is a Facebook Item and why would I want to add one?

I understand -- and share -- your confusion, actually. I ignored "Post Item" in Facebook until one day when I just poked around a bit and realized that the text you want to include with your link is entered on the second page, and that it's not just a bookmark sharing capability.

It's darn confusing, in my opinion!

Let me show you. Go to a group (or even an individual Facebook profile) and you'll see:

What you want to do here is copy and paste the URL of the thing you want to link to, whether it's a YouTube video, photograph on Flickr or even a page on your blog. Enter the URL itself, then click on "Post". Trust me, there's more to come...

Sure enough, the next screen now lets you enter a comment or description:

You can add multiple paragraphs by just separating them with a blank line. Notice here that the title it picked up from checking the URL isn't very good. It doesn't look like it, but if you actually click on the title, you'll find you can edit it, as I've done here:

Once the description is good and the title is good, click on "Post" again, and you're done:

Congratulations! You've posted your first item on Facebook. See, it wasn't too hard. :-)