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Social Bookmarking for Freelance Writers

September 13th, 2010 · 3 Comments

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By Leslie A. Joy

If you’re a writer, you tend to collect information. If you’re niche writer, you tend to collect information that you KNOW you’re going to use a few times. The collecting part is easy—it’s how to organize those collections that’s hard.

Finding a social bookmarking site is easy–finding one you like is whole other matter. I’ll lay out some options, explain some of the pros and cons of each, and then you’ll have a nice starting point for picking one out instead of wandering blindly and just arbitrarily picking one after an afternoon of frustration.

Delicious

Delicious is probably the most well-known bookmarking apps and the easiest to use. You have your choice of bookmarklet, Firefox extension, Chrome extension, or manually inputting the site URL. You click on the extension or bookmarklet, add some notes, add some tags, and voila!—you’re done. You also have the option to share the link with other Delicious users who you know.

While it’s ubiquitous and easy to use, it really hasn’t been updated since Yahoo bought it and it’s far from the most robust tool out there.

Best For: Those who want a simple bookmarking tool without a lot of frills.

For More Information:

Diigo

Diigo is very similar to Delicious, except much-more feature packed. Diigo bills itself as “A Personal Research Tool, A Collaborative Research Platform, A Social Content Site, and A Knowledge-Sharing Community.” Normally, I’d scoff at such high expectations to live up to, but Diigo actually does an amazing job. In addition to bookmarking and tagging sites, you can highlight content and add sticky notes-just like you would in a book or magazine. The information is then stored on Diigo servers allowing you to access it from multiple-browsers and even the iPhone.

In addition—yes! there’s more!—you can easily share the bookmarks with other people, search the Diigo repository for information, subscribe to the most recent bookmarks under a set of tags, and find people with similar interests. It really takes “social bookmarking” to a new level. In addition—yes, even more!—you can easily create a group of friends, coworkers, colleagues, etc., and create a mass pool of bookmarks on a certain topic.

Diigo offers a full-featured app for the iPhone-including offline reading, a powerful note-taking app for Android phones, a toolbar for Firefox, an extension for Google Chrome, and a bookmarklet. You can also choose the “save to Delicious” option, ensuring that all the bookmarks you save to your Diigo account are also saved to your Delicious account.

Best for: People working on collaborative projects, people who miss being able to mark web pages up like a book or magazine, people who don’t want to give up their Delicious account, but want more features, and those who really want to take “social bookmarking” to the next level.

For More Information:

Web Notes

Web Notes bills itself as “research management for professionals” and it delivers. You can highlight and add notes to not just websites, but PDFs also, keep everything organized with folders and tags, and then download everything into a clean, professional looking report. You can even share your notes via permalink, email, or Twitter.

There are three account options: Lite, Pro, and Platinum. Lite is a free account option offering web page annotation, the ability to organize and search notes, and the ability to share notes via email, Twitter, and permalink. Pro is a paid account costing $5 per month or $35 per year. It offers the same features as the Lite account, plus multi-color annotations, PDF annotations, Report generation, page caching, and sharing notes via RSS feed. The platinum is geared towards the enterprise, with a hefty price tag of $300/user/month. It includes everything the Pro account does, plus some pretty amazing features such as RSS subscriptions import, media monitoring, multi-user support and administration, and a custom domain site and branding.

Best For: Serious web researchers, those who want to be able to take their web page notes anywhere, and Enterprise users.

For More Information:

Historious

Ever wish you had your own personal Google that exclusively checked the sites and resources you liked? Historious aims to do just that! Historious allows you to “bookmark” items, then indexes the page much like Google does. There’s no need for tags-you just “Historify” the page, and then Historify does the rest of the work. Historify then allows you to go to the site and search your bookmarks, just like you could search Google. It’s quick and efficient and takes care of the “What on earth did I tag that site as?” problem.

Historious is available as both a Firefox and Chrome extension, plus there’s a bookmarklet.

Historious is free for up to 3,000 bookmarks. After that it is, $2.90 per month or $18.90 per year.

Best For: Those who can never remember what they tagged things as, those who don’t need notes on the page they bookmark,and those who wish they could have their own personal google.

For More Information:


Today’s guest post is from Leslie A. Joy. Leslie A. Joy is a marketing assistant, process manager, and analytics geek.

Tags: Guest Posts · Writing Tools

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