Lollipop Local

There’s absolutely tons of bookmarking sites out there and I’ve not really bothered with them much other than to put links to my posts and articles. That’s not strictly true I do add the occasional photo and I quite like the ‘stumble’ feature of Stumble Upon, however once you find the links, comment and perhaps share them what else is there?

And importantly what else would you want them for? I have recently rediscovered and once again began to use Diigo, which is a bookmarking site with a bit more. I watched a video on it some time ago and began to use some of its features while researching for blog posts. It really is very useful for this purpose.

Sadly Henry Cooper died recently and I wanted to write a post for my blog. So I used Diigo to collect links and snippets from the pages themselves which I wrote the post with. Our ‘Enry was the first boxer to be knighted so I searched in Google for that term and got the usual page of results.

Two pages caught my eye, one from the BBC site from when the Knighthood was announced and the yahoo news page with him smiling after receiving the award. So I visited both of these to see if there was any content I could use. This is when the magic of Diigo comes in. You can download a toolbar or the ‘diigolet’ either work well, I use the toolbar on my pc and the ‘diigolet’ on my notebook to save space. These have all the controls you need right in front of you and ready to use.

Ideally you want to create lists in Diigo to keep your bookmarks organized. Using lists allows you to bookmark interesting, relevant webpages adding them to these lists as you browse, thereby building up a store of useful info for any particular blog post

So, when you press the bookmark button or click the Diigo bookmark command in the right click menu on a webpage the above box pops up. Here you can add a description, to help keep track of what each bookmark is, tags and add the link to a list, and even tweet it on the fly! This is handy and a good habit to get into as lists can get quite long and a short description helps you remember what each item is about.

I tend to do this with Diigo, which is something I’ve never managed to do consistently with browser bookmarking. As the option is easily accessible without leaving the page of interest I am encouraged to do so.

Diigo Highlighting feature

My favourite feature though is the highlighter. This allows you to select and highlight text, which means it stays prominent when you revisit the page. But that’s not the best bit, Diigo captures the text you highlight and displays it under the bookmark when you go to your list on Diigo.

This is great for collecting quotes or highlighting points to mark in an article. You can even put in a post it note to make any comments you need about a particular page. This really is a great timesaving feature. You can plan out your article with these comments and highlights.

You ‘ll notice that each list has a dedicated permalink, which can be shared, by email or via ‘add this’. I haven’t used this feature but it would be useful for planning a holiday with a group of friends. You could create a list of potential holiday accommodation, highlight and post notes on certain features then send the url to the other people to help decide where to go or stay. A nice, tidy solution to a tedious chore.

Sharing a useful list of resources for a particular subject would be a very easy and quickly produced blog post, or part of a better post on a topic. You could take a screenshot of your list to tempt readers, with the image linking to your list.  Alternatively, screenshots from each page would be a better insight into the content of each.

Other Features

There’s more you can do with Diigo Bookmarking, for instance you can create a little order in your list by dividing it into sections. There’s an option to create a section in a list which acts as a header for a subsection of a list. This helps you find what you need quickly and efficiently.

Also you can create groups for collaborative work, if you so desire. If a group of colleagues are working on a project, or you are working on content generation with a client, perhaps, you can share a bookmarks in a group and adjust the settings so that members of your group can be updated of a new bookmark daily, weekly or immediately as your needs dictate. If planning that holiday with friends you could have suggestions from more than one person and then share these with the others for a decision to be made.

There are also premium features which allow better search options and the ability to take screenshots. The screenshots in this article were not from Diigo but from snaggit. I am currently using version 4 but version 5 offers even more, with improved integration with an android app amongst other things.

Conclusion

I really like Diigo, I find it really helpful and in combination with other tools a great way to find bookmarks as the default browser bo0kmarking tends to be rather messy. I’ll be using this great tool with clients in the future to help them discover content to either directly use on their blog or to spark the creative juices. Diigo is great and will only get better over time.

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Tags: blog, blogging, blogging tool, bookmarking, Diigo, social-bookmarking, Social-bookmarking-sites, what-is-diigo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 at 12:31 am and is filed under Local Social Media Optimisation, Social Media, Social Media and SEO, Social Media For Business, Social Media For Marketing, Social Media Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.