Anyone with a blog will tell you: the best thing about the social media sharing revolution is the “sharing” part.

Popular sharing sites like YouTube, Photobucket and Last.fm offer embed codes, strings of code that make it easy for you to plug a video or a song (inside a small player or display wrapper) into your page. These codes work great for sites that offer them, but embed codes and options for embedding media differ greatly from site to site. And some sites don’t offer any easy sharing codes.

It’s easy enough to post an image or MP3 if you know some HTML. But by now we’re deep into the age of the big “share” button — blog tools and widgets that offer no-brainer, one-click posting. So if you’re building a social app that allows users to share images, videos or songs, your visitors will expect something that’s as dead easy as it gets.

To that end, what if there was a standard for grabbing a full multimedia embed code from a URL? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn a simple URL link into an embedded Flickr image or YouTube video? Sure, you can reverse engineer many of the various embed structures offered by sharing sites, but what happens when the host of your embeded media changes its format or relocates the actual asset? Thousands of broken links suddenly litter your site.

These are the wishes (and problems) that led to OEmbed, a new proposed standard for taking a URL and generating an embed link. The proposal is the brainchild of Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone, as well Cal Henderson of Flickr and Richard Crowley of OpenDNS.

Not every site supports it, so OEmbed isn’t going to solve all your embedding needs overnight. But given that some big names — like Flickr and Viddler — have already signed on, we think others will soon follow suit.

Let’s dive in to see how OEmbed can make your life (and your webapp) easier.