Sarah Worsham | Sazbean

Sarah Worsham / Apr 15, 2008

Business Knowledge Sharing Community – Diigo

Billed as a research tool and knowledge-sharing community, Diigo (still in beta) has many of the same bookmark-sharing features as Ma.gnolia. You can tag and share your bookmarks with your friends and colleagues, and find new people to connect with in the social network. Unique to Diigo, the ‘People Like Me’ suggests people with similar interests based on tags and bookmarks. Suggesting new people requires enough tags and bookmarks to work. However, importing bookmarks from del.icio.us (281) either did not work with this function or wasn’t enough information for a recommendation. Along with matching tags, connections can be made with others currently online, new to diigo, featured people or searching. Diigo offers browser add-ons to make adding bookmarks, comments, tags, etc. very easy.

Most impressive and innovative is the ability to annotate and highlight content on webpages which will appear the next time you visit the page or when you share these notes with others. This note-sharing functionality makes it possible to use Diigo to share research with colleagues and co-workers, which could be very beneficial in the B2B marketplace. If a webpage is of interest to your coworkers, not only can you bookmark and share it with them, you can highlight specific content and makes notes on the webpage which they can see when they visit. Your coworkers can then make their own notes and highlights, which creates a very powerful shared research environment. (This could also be very useful for web designers who could have their clients markup website designs with changes right on the website – no more faxes and pdfs!)

The layout and design of Diigo is not as polished as Ma.gnolia, but is fairly usable. Editing bookmarks that I imported from del.icio.us took almost 30 seconds to save changes. Using the browser add-on, adding a bookmark did not ask for any tags or descriptions (which del.icio.us does), and sent the bookmark to my unread portion of my profile. This seems strange since I was the one that added the bookmark. One would expect unread bookmarks to come from friends or coworkers.

Overall I think Diigo has some very promising functionality, especially in the annotations and floating sticky notes, but seems to be very slow to use. It is still in beta, so hopefully some of these quirks will be worked out to make it a much more useful tool for business websites.

Technorati Tags: diigo, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking, business social bookmarking, B2B, B2C, business internet reviews

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 10, 2008

B2B Social Bookmarking – Ma.gnolia

Similar to Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia allows you to save and share bookmarks with friends and colleagues. However, Ma.gnolia takes the social aspect to a new level and has a very easy-to-use intuitive design.

Ma.gnolia is truly a social place to trade bookmarks. You can find, join and start groups with similar interests, which share people, tags, and links. Tagging is an integral part to any social bookmarking site and ma.gnolia integrates tags throughout their website, presented in tag clouds so you can easily see what the group feels is important. Almost every page has a featured linker to provide you with both a new person to link up to and new content to look at. Ma.gnolia makes it very easy to find new people and to see what the community finds interesting.

Ma.gnolia’s design is both beautiful and easy-to-use, making it fun to browse around looking for interesting sites or people. Your profile homepage shows recent bookmarks from you, your contacts, and your groups all in one place. Exploration is encouraged with lists of recent bookmarks, hot links and hot groups. Links can easily be imported from del.icio.us and login is a breeze – using your choice of openid, yahoo, facebook, clickpass, wordpress, livejournal, aol or typepad.

Adding bookmarks is easy with several ‘bookmarklets’ which are links you can add to your browser. One of these, Roots, also lets you see what the Ma.gnolia community thinks about the page before you add it – tying you to the community even when you are browsing around the web. Sharing your bookmarks on your website or blog is also easy, with a wide variety of officially supported Add-ons and a large community creating their own in the wiki.

Adding a social bookmarking service to your website or blog is a great way to easily add content and connect with your readers. Ma.gnolia also offers a way to increase traffic to your website due to the large community and social functionality. If you’re looking for a robust social bookmarking service for your blog or website, take a close look at Ma.gnolia.

UPDATE: You can take a look at my ma.gnolia profile to get a feel for how it works.

Technorati Tags: ma.gnolia, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Sarah Worsham / Apr 3, 2008

B2B Social Bookmarking – Del.icio.us

What? Del.icio.us? What kind of url/company name is that? Well, it’s both a company name and a url, and Del.icio.us is one of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is sharing of website links publicly or through your network. Del.icio.us and many other services also allow you to tag the link with keywords and a short description or comment. You can decide per link whether it is shared with others and every keyword has a RSS feed tied to it so people can subscribe to your link feed (and to your del.icio.us profile page). Del.icio.us is valuable as a content provider, link network, research tool, and seo tool.

Content Provider

Del.icio.us is an easy way to add link blogging to your B2B website or blog. Once you add a link to del.icio.us, you can set it up so it automatically appears on your blog (through a script/tag). This is also an easy way to add content to your blog – tagging pages as you come upon them throughout the day. Both Firefox and IE have del.icio.us extensions which easily allow you to add the site you’re looking at to your profile.

Link Network

If your friends or colleagues are on del.icio.us, you can easily send them specific links (and they can send you links). This is a very valuable way of sharing important information or websites and allows others to browse them at their convenience. If they are sharing their links, you can also see what your network (or others) have tagged for various keywords, which is a very valuable way to keep up with what people feel is important online. This can also be valuable way to show your expertise in the B2B marketplace for whatever niche industries you serve.

Research Tool

Need to know what’s going on in your industry? Need to find links for a particular project or client? Searching del.icio.us for content can sometimes be more reliable than search engines (depending on the subject in question). I find it particularly valuable for subjects that search engines and other social bookmarking sites tend to bury because the subjects are not consumer oriented. Even if there are only a few entries for a particular subject, del.icio.us will give you access to all of them in a very easy-to-navigate format.

SEO Tool

Del.icio.us is a very valuable tool for sending traffic to your website, allowing you to submit and tag your content very easily. More importantly, it is not spamming the system, and usually not frowned upon (although it will look better if your link feed includes links other than your own content). It is also important to give your readers a link to del.icio.us on everything you write, to make it easy for them to submit and add your links to the network (add this! is a good product to look at).

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

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