Del.icio.us was a big discovery for me. The ability to access my bookmarks anywhere, share them with others, and discover my friends’ favorites: Wow!

But I had a moment of truth the day I clicked a months-old bookmark only to discover that one of my favorite pages on Web design had vanished. D’oh! I’d really depended on that material! Suddenly apprehensive, I started going through all of my del.icio.us links one-by-one, discovering that a large percentage had vanished off the face of the Web.

It felt almost like I’d had a hard drive failure. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to depend on Web-based content.

Sure, for finding the odd missing page, there’s always Archive.org, but that saves pages intermittently and it’s a fairly clunky solution for an ongoing problem. What I really needed was a social bookmarking service that cached a full version of each bookmarked page with all the graphics and formatting intact.

Get Digging

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply.

(Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

But getting the most out of Diigo isn’t as simple as swapping out your del.icio.us quick bookmarks and moving on. Strategy counts.

A Method to the Bookmarking Madness

There are some types of sites you shouldn’t bother archiving. I use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Toodledo constantly, but if any of them goes down, an archived version won’t do me a lick of good. For sites I simply access frequently, I keep a bookmark tab on my Netvibes page.

Use Diigo for static pages with useful content. Here are some suggested uses from my own Diigo love affair:

• Research. Why bother copying and pasting articles you’ll be using in your next paper or presentation when you can add them to a searchable database in one click?
• Publicity. If you have a blog, podcast, or other promotable work, you’ll want to clip all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. Diigo’s perfect for quickly and easily capturing those mentions for posterity and, since it’s shareable, you can show off your best clips in a snap.
• Want List. It’s not really a resolution, but I do plan to cut down on my expenditures in 2008, and one way that’s always worked well for me in the past is creating a “want list.” When I see a nifty notebook or gadget or safety razor I want to buy, I add it to the want list with the date. 30 days later, if it still sounds awesome, I’ll buy it. But often my enthusiasm for that nifty cable wrap I saw on Cool Tools has waned and I’ve saved twenty bucks.
• Lifehacks. Obviously. If you’re like me, you’re constantly gathering tips and advice on productivity and technology from around the Web. Save them here and go over them periodically to see which ones actually worked in practice and which were quickly forgotten.
• Recipes. Several recipe sites let you aggregate your favorites, but if you get your recipes from multiple sites, you can use Diigo to keep them all in the same place.
• Blogging. One of the big advantages of a social bookmarking service is the social part. Diigo makes it easy to share your links, post them to your blog, or even do an automatic daily post of links to your site.

Best of all, Diigo can automatically post any new links to the other social bookmarking sites of your choice, so there’s no need to re-sync if you try Diigo and end up not liking the experience. Your old account will be up-to-date and ready to roll.

When you sign up, make sure to take a quick tour through the robust tools available on the site, from the browser toolbar to the “diigolet” quick link. With Diigo, capturing Web-based content (and sharing it with others) is quick, easy, and seamless.

Posted in: archiving, bookmarking