Library clips

Some more thoughts on WyaCracker…see what it’s about here.

An obvious choice is that you could use the form widget as a guest book form on your blog home page, or as a survey/poll on your homepage (even at the post level).

If your blog didn’t have a comments function (most do) what about using it as a comments form for each blog post…you’d have to work out a way so a new form automatically appears for each blog post.

What is handy is that the same form you enter data in also doubles up as a search form…there’s not one blog I have seen where you can search in the comments of a blog post, handy for Techcrunch who amass hundreds of comments in each blog post.

Then the idea would be to be able to search comments across all your blog posts…I can do this in my blog admin area, but my visitors don’t have the luxury.

The next step would be to go bigger, if a network of bloggers used a comments widget (and used the same fields), maybe somehow they could merge their widgets, so you could search the comments across a batch of blogs…kind of like what Rollyo does for the body content.

This isn’t leading to a comment search engine is it…

More

If you are pointing to a comment discussion on a blog, you could point to the comment on the form results page (not sure if each comment has a permalink yet), but this is nothing new…what you could also choose to do is just embed the comment form from that blog post in your blog post.

eg. You are writing about a blog post on TechCrunch and you are referring to lots of comments left on that post, as well as linking to the comments, you could also embed the widget in your blog, so the readers of your blog post could search the TechCrunch comments for that post and even add their own to the discussion.

Another idea would suit those types of blog posts that review a distributed discussion
eg. blog A said this, then blog B responded in his/her post by saying this, then blog A posted again, then blog C posted and so on…just check out BlogPulse conversation Tracker…more.
At the end of this review post you could enter all the links from the distributed discussion into a form widget and embed it in your blog post. This way after reading the blog post people could do a blank search to see the discussion list or just plain old search the discussion.
NOTE: BlogPulse Conversation Tracker could include a search option to search across all blog posts in the discussion.

I have posted on similar list type form sites like ListRing, and FLEXlists…this comes close as you can share the read/write version but it can’t embed a widget or search…whereas WyaCracker has all of this by default.

Others I haven’t tried:
Sidewalk
Wufoo
FormSpring
jotForm

Diigo are really moving forward in the bookmark arena, and they haven’t even released yet…see my earlier review.

Basically what makes Diigo stand out from the rest is that you can highlight and add sticky notes to sections of a bookmark…these can be expanded to be displayed in your user bookmark stream…or if you are in the Diigo community and you visit the native page of this bookmark, you will see the annotations.

Not only the human indexed web, it’s the human annotated web!

But wait there’s more, after compiling and annotating notes you can draft and publish them straight into your blog, from within the Diigo blog editor.

This is an idea for a all-in-one research tool

READ-COMMENT/CLIP-PUBLISH

- RSS Reader for your reading
(if a site hasn’t got a feed, use Ponyfish or Feedwhip)
(comment to a post from within the RSS Reader, it also saves your comment in a folder in your collections - this folder can have an RSS feed - …also if you comment to a post from outside of your RSS Reader this can also be saved via a bookmarklet)

- Save items to your collection, and also to a blog post bay folder
(also be able to save random notes to this blog post bay folder, or links that haven’t come from within your RSS Reader)

- When you are ready send a tag from your blog post bay folder to the inbuilt blog editor and draft/publish a post

NOTE: reblog, and MySyndicaat are slightly different…with reBlog you can send an item from your RSS Reader to a clip blog, this is curating content…I guess this is exactly what the Bloglines Clip Blog does, not sure if you can add your own text.
MySyndicaat can also clip (even email) a post to a digest blog, but you can’t do this from a personal RSS Reader, you can only do it from the Public RSS Reader (this means content may pass by as a Public RSS Reader doesn’t have unread/read functionality as it is public).
Also to add reblog can clip stuff from outside your RSS Reader, MySyndicaat lacks this feature.

Anyway, there’s lots of new stuff, and note Diigo has plenty of other unique features.

LinkRolls

Now like del.icio.us you can get a linkroll for just one tag or a combination of tags, but more amazing is that annotations/sticky notes/comments are now part of the linkroll if you wish.

Next to each item in the linkroll you can click “expand” to see annotations/sticky notes/comments…this is context (not sure if you will see the whole Diigo community annotations/sticky notes/comments for a given item or just yours).

If you click on the actual item in the linkroll you will be taken to the native site where you can see the annotations/sticky notes in more context (must have to be a Diigo user to see this).

Anyway check out the screenshots.

Blog This

This has really been enhanced…3 ways.

1. Highlight text and right-click or use the toolbar to Blog This!
- only your highlighted text and link to original page get automatically posted to an editing window

Then you are taken to a blog editor (editing window)…compose your blog post, give it a title, choose your category and publish to your blog right from within Diigo…awesome.

2. After you have already bookmarked a page, you can find a bookmark and send one of your bookmarks to your Diigo blog editor.

3. Check a batch of bookmarks and select Blog This! from the drop down action menu.

See the screenshots.

Feedback

This is mostly concerning step 3.

If I use a tag called “to blog”, all the bookmarks in this tag are complied for future blog posts.
But how do I remember which bookmarks are for which future blog post, I need sub-tags within the “to blog” tag.

An option is to offer a channel or a folder, call this folder “to blog”, within this folder you can create tags, when you click on the bookmarklet, you can first choose a folder, then choose or create a tag within this folder.
When you add a bookmark to a tag within this folder you could also have an option that says “exclusive” to this tag.
This means this bookmark will only be saved in this tag in this folder, if you have a same tag name elsewhere in Diigo it will not be included (but you could have an option include/exclude).

But just say the tag name in your folder is a phrase, a kind of draft blog title name, but you also want this bookmark in your collection at large.
At the time of bookmarking you could choose a folder then choose a tag, if you choose “include”, then it will say which tag do you want to use for your collection at large.

Anyway the point of this is that when I bookmark a page I can add it to a tag containing all content for a future single blog post…you can have heaps of these tags, and they won’t be lost in your tag cloud as they can live in a channel or folder.

This is how I use Google Notebook, this service has revolutionised how I collect thoughts, text, links for future blog posts…that’s right you can just add a note.
Diigo doesn’t have free text links, you can only bookmark webpages, you can’t make your own notes (but Diigo is a bookmark service first, and a blog post compiler second)…see Simpy Notes, and TagFacts.

NOTE: you can make your own notes with sticky notes, but what I mean is if you have a thought or idea and you want to jot it down you would have to bookmark a random webpage and annotate it just to get your note down.

Also to add these notes or links to Google Notebook is so handy, the little icon just above the systems tray is a mini-version of your notebook…it’s really amazing.