Linksharing Update
Photo totally unrelated to the content of this post, offered for those who may not be quite as interested in social bookmarking as I am. 🙂
I still haven’t found the one best, perfect means of sharing nifty internet finds with others. To be fair, even before Google killed off Reader Share, I was forever searching for that one best, perfect show-and-tell vehicle. Reader’s share button was so easy that I took it for granted.
Linksharing is important to me. I truly loved being able to click through to your blogs and explore your Reader Shared Items widgets. I loved that I could follow those link collections on my own Reader. I love it when someone on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter shares an intriguing bit of reading—love it so much that I’m reluctant to rely on chance to put those links before my eyes in the rapid infostream. I want an RSS feed of your nifty stuff: that’s the bottom line.
Some of you share links right on your blog, and that’s terrific. I could do that myself, have done in the past, but over time I’ve found that I prefer to keep my booknotes and family chronicle separate from my show-and-tell treasures. I’m a compartmentalizer.
This past week, I’ve experimented with Diigo as my primary linksharing vehicle. I was already using it to share booklists in my sidebar. I love how its widget folds itself neatly into my blog design. And I love that it has an RSS feed so you can subscribe if you’d like. What it’s lacking—and this is a biggie—is reciprocity. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t like that you can’t comment on links. Sharing isn’t as much fun if it’s one-way.
Diigo
For a while, I was using Tumblr as a way to archive my own online reading—not necessarily links I wanted to share, but things I’d read and wanted to be able to reference later. I fell out of the habit after a while. (Around the time of Comic-Con, I see, which explains the lapse.) As a sharing platform, it has much to offer: excellent visuals (you can share [and credit!] photos and videos as well as text links); a combox; an RSS feed. But its sidebar widget is incompatible with my blog design. That’s not a dealbreaker; I’m sure there are WordPress plugins for Tumblr feeds, and anyway I’ve got a redesign planned for early next year. (New books, new look.)
So for now, you may find (and subscribe to) my shared links at both Tumblr and Diigo, your choice. If I decide to let one of them lapse, I’ll let you know.
If you have come up with a replacement for your Google Reader Shared Items, please leave the link in my comments!