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In the last year or two social book marking sites have become all the rage. Del.icio.us was probably the first truly successful such site but now there are quite literally dozens of such sites. In this post I don’t want to go in depth on the how and why of social book marking, there is a ton of info on that if you want to know more and perhaps in time we will review a few of the more popular ones. 

No today I want to talk to you about Diigo and more accurately the Diigo Tool Bar for the Mozilla FireFox Browser. Like most tech geeks I got on board using Del.icio.us a while ago and liked it ok. To me at least I could always find things I had seen before and that alone was worth the effort. Then one day I read a blog post on this new service called Diigo which had some really cool features over Del.icio.us but that was not what got my attention. No it was the tool bar that would let me bookmark in like 10 of the most popular bookmarking services in one shot. 

So I could put any of my own content in all the sites in seconds along with content I might want to use again. I tried it and with a few hiccups it has worked great. Currently using the tool bar you can bookmark in the following services, 

Diigo (well duh) 
Furl  
Blinklist  
Spurl  
Yahoo MyWeb2.0  
Shadows  
Connotea (I have not played with this one yet) 
Del.icio.us  
Simpy  
RawSugar  
Netvouz  
Ma.gnolia  

That is a pretty substantial list and there are a few things I want to point out to our readers about this new service from Diigo. First that after using many of these services I think Diigo is among the best. 

The ease of book marking and tagging sites is great along with the fact you can highlight part of a page you are bookmarking and it will be added in with your bookmark. The next thing that has made Diigo my new tool of choice is the amazing user help forum where you quickly get answers and help from people that work for Diigo. I recently had an issue with Netvouz not getting updated when I book marked new material, my question was answered in only minutes, pointing me to a new beta version of the tool bar in their labs section which has corrected the problem.

The last feature that has made me fall in love with Diigo is the most important, it is the tool bar itself that lets me add content to all those other social sites in seconds. Take away everything else and I would still use it as my primary tool just for this feature. (There is a marketing lesson in that alone)  

Why? Well, social book marking is experiencing the same type of market acceptance and battle that the search engine world went through back in the 90s and to me that means a few of them will come out as the equivalent to MSN, Yahoo, Ask and Google in the future. Which ones? Who knows so I want my content in as many of them as possible. 

Just like at one time you worked to get you web pages into LookSmart, HotBot, etc. I have also noticed that while links and Del.icio.us are all tagged with rel=”nofollow” and therefore don’t help with link popularity for SEO that many of the others are not tagged and I have found that Google and the others not only will index you personal Diigo, RawSugar, etc pages if you provide links to them from other web pages, they will also deep crawl the links and follow them. How much link popularity boost will they provide? 

Who knows but it can’t hurt and it may speed indexing of new content as well which is a huge plus. So I now have the Diigo Bar squarely in my browser bar and I bookmark my personal new content in every service available through it. I also bookmark any content I might want to see again some day from any source to keep my links varied and growing and above all useful to myself and others. 

So I want to be clear that I am not talking about just spamming these services with only my own content but using them as designed and including my own content when I do. It took a bit of time to set up accounts with all the services and with some I was able to import all my existing Del.icio.us bookmarks to get them going. Yet now that it is done my content is being added to the entire list each day. So to me it was a few hours well spent. 

Of course when ever Diigo updates the tool bar and ads a new service I will add it as well. You may want to consider using Diigo the same way to get your content into the most popular services and build your own directory of sites you want to be able to find. If so please consider adding our blog as well. So what services do you use and what do you think the future of social bookmarking is? 

~ Jack Spirko 

Technorati Tags: Diigo, Furl, Blinklist, Spurl, Yahoo MyWeb2.0, Shadows, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Simpy, RawSugar, Netvouz, Ma.gnolia, social bookmarking, bookmark, bookmarking, social search, marketing, web marketing, internet marketing

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