Bookmarking tool Diigo makes blogging easier
I’ve been using Diigo for years now. I personally think it’s one of those services that has never received the traction it deserved. While Diigo is an amazing research and collaboration tool, it’s work stream features make it invaluable to me. In fact there are so many things Diigo does I think that’s part of the reason it hasn’t gained more traction, it’s overwhelming.
For me the ability to share whatever it is that I’m reading through multiple channels is a life saver (at the least it’s a major time saver).
Like delicious, the 800 pound gorilla in the social bookmarking world, Diigo allows you to bookmark cool stuff you find on the web. Diigo doesn’t stop there, it lets you highlight portions of the site, which other Diigo users can see, as well as annotate the pages you are on. Once you have Diigo installed you can highlight portions of a page, leave some notes about it and other Diigo users will see the highlights and notes. It’s very slick. But for me that’s not even the coolest part.
I won’t even try and go through everything that Diigo does but you can have groups in Diigo, you can start or join communities based on topics or taggs, you can watch their hotlist which is a aggregate page of the most frequently bookmarked pages or set up alerts for certain tags.
Post to Blog
Diigo has a Post to Blog feature that works similarly to WordPress’ Press This feature. While on a page use this option to quickly post a few thoughts and a link to your blog. I don’t use this feature much because it has limited formatting ability and since I use WordPress I could always use the Press This option.
Auto Blog Post
Most bookmarking service have an option to post all your bookmarks to your blog at a set scheduled time. The problem I had with Delicious’ version was that it posted everything to your blog. The other problem I had with delicious is that there were only so many characters allowed in the note section of the bookmark. With Diigo I can write as much as I want and only have specified bookmarks auto post.
With Diigo I can set certain tags to post to different blogs. For this blog I use a ‘ncb’ tag that posts every morning my previous days bookmarks. That’s the Random Thoughts post you see here. For my other blogs I use different tags. There’s no end to the combinations here.
If I wanted to I could create multiple “Jobs” for each blog. I could have separate posts for all ‘mobile’ tags and a different ‘Job’ for ‘Marketing’ tags and post them at separate times. If I tag a bookmark with ‘ncb’ and ‘n00b’ that same bookmark with my annotations post to both blogs. I could go on but I think you get the idea.
Tweet This
Last but not least is the ability to send each bookmark to Twitter. Every time you bookmark something there is a box to check if you want to send this to Twitter. If you check that box, after hitting save, Diigo will open a new field that takes the title and header of the page you’re on, use Tinyurl to shrink the url and adds a link to your Diigo profile. Often times the title and header make a bad tweet and the Diigo link to my profile is kind of long so I delete everything except the Tinyurl (I wish they used Bit.ly) and then write my own tweet.
Have your cake and eat it too
Don’t want to give up on your current bookmarking service? No problem, Diigo will forward all of your bookmarks to whichever bookmarking service you’re already using.
I also think Diigo is intriguing because we don’t know much about it. They’re based in Reno NV not your usual tech hubs. It was started by Wade Ren and Maggie Tsia both of whom were Angel investors with Sierra Angels before starting Diigo. I’m sure there’s more backstory there but I’m not able to find it.
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