The Scribe

Yes! I have finally found a social bookmarking tool I really like. Diigo.

Social bookmarking tool is an essential tool to any information junkie.

What does it do basically?

You browse a lot of sites. Read a lot of articles. Sometimes you find an interesting article and bookmark it using your browser for future reading. Bookmarks get accumulated overtime and becomes a pain to manage (Although Firefox 3 has an excellent bookmarking system). If you are a good bookmarking manager, this scenario works out well enough for you (enter Firefox 3 bookmarking again! I love it basically!). But, what if you browse the web using different computers? Your bookmarks gets scattered. A social bookmarking tools becomes a priceless tool in this case. In addition to portability, these tools provide a social angle to your experience. You can share your stuff with your friends. They do a whole lot other things too, but being a social bookmarking virgin (!), yours truly is truly ignorant off.

The main player is Del.icio.us. There are a whole lot of other tools as well: Furl, Magnolia etc. I tried my hand at Delicious when it launched, but didn't the UI and stopped using it in Day 1 itself. Furl survived for 2-3 days at most. Most importantly, even though I loved the concept, I was never enthusiastic about any of these services. Stumbleupon is another
bookmarking like tool, but I usually use it stumble upon webpages when
I am bored. Lets say its like a page rating and recommendation tool,
rather than a genuine bookmarking tool. Digg, Reddit, and Mixx are considered as social bookmarking sites, but I would classify them as social news sites rather due to their unique positioning. I surf both Digg and Reddit regularly.

Yesterday, I came upon a mashup made in Diigo, based on the Twitter Story Contest by Copyblogger. It was very useful since it was pain checking the 200 odd entries through Twitter. Today I went through the wikipedia entry for Diigo. Went through a nightmare of a review from Mashable and a glowing review from TechCrunch. To be frank, I was bowled by the feature set. You can bookmark, you comment on various webpages, you can highlight and save certain portions of the webpages, you can share your bookmarks and comments or choose not to do so, Twitter the same stuff, and a whole lot more. A nice interface adds to the experience. To experience the complete power, you need to install the toolbar. Believe me, its worth it!

I have finally found the bookmarking tool I was missing critically. Happy. My salute goes to the developers for thinking like me while making this tool.

You can find me at Diigo here.