The URL rope-a-dope, or how social bookmarking should evolve

So there I was, reading a New York Times story this morning. It was interesting, so I casually clicked on my Diigo toolbar to bookmark the page. Only when I'd read further down the page (and after I had made a few comments and highlights on the story) did I realize my error.

The NYT had paginated the story, meaning that there, sitting at the bottom of the page, mocking my attempt to bookmark in a meaningful way, was a "next page" nav link.

What does that mean for Diigo bookmarking (or any social bookmarking site)? It means that when I navigate to page 2 or any subsequent page, I have changed URLs, which means that even though I am reading another part of the same article, I might as well have gone from the NYT to TMZ in the eyes of my social bookmarking service.

For Diigo, this means that all my Web highlights and annotations existed on a different page from the rest of the article. That meant I had to go to the "view as single page" option (thankfully, the NYT offers one, though not all sites do) and recreate my highlights and comments. Then I had to go to Diigo and delete my erroneous bookmark. Too complicated.

Can't we do better.

As I see it, the problem can be fixed in one of two ways. First, you can get the content providers, the Web sites, to agree on some standard for publishing content, such as eliminating pagination, creating stable permalinks for all their stories, etc. That would eliminate the problem of all these squirrelly URLs screwing with my social bookmarking system. There would be two versions of all articles (at most): the screen version and the printer-friendly version.

But because there are millions of content providers writing millions of bookmarkable items a day and because pagination and all those funny URLs link in with making money online, it's unlikely that we'll see change on the content provider side of this equation.

So that means we need to look at option two: the social bookmarking service needs to evolve.

Diigo is a prime candidate for this kind of evolution because its community-building tools are especially vulnerable to the URL rope-a-dope. Say another user and I are reading the same article on the Washington Post and we make comments that would lead to some sort of meaningful exchange of ideas. But the other user and I bookmarked different URLs for the same article. That means that we never see each other's comments and never have that discussion -- the community-building tools are negated by the URL issue.

Sure, we could probably find each other's comments by doing a tag or keyword search on Diigo's site, but that is far more effort that I am willing to put in. I'm willing to bet that most other users would agree with me. Who wants to interrupt their Web itinerary to go to Diigo.com, search through a mercurial list of user-defined tags to try to find another person who has bookmarked the same story as you and then see whether or not they have provided comments that you might want to respond to.

Diigo's community tools live in a Firefox plugin for me, which is ubiquitous. I use it all the time. And it has access to the commenting and highlighting done by other people, but I have yet to actually visit a Web page that someone else has commented on or highlighted. Ever. The FF plugin should make it easy for me to be a part of the Diigo community, but the URL problem stymies this.

The solution to this problem could take one of two forms, as I see it. First, you could write complex algorithms that would be used by Diigo or Delicious or whatever site to seamlessly blend multiple URLs that refer to the same article, even if they are technically different from each other. That would solve it without any user help. It would be invisible, it would be convenient, and it would vastly improve the community-building on the social bookmarking sites.

I don't know if this is possible or not. I'm not a programmer.

Second solution: Band together and form some kind of industry standard permalink that would be recognizable to social bookmarking sites. It could be part of an API or part of the XML feed for the page. Whatever. When you click on "bookmark this," Diigo or Delicious checks the URL you submitted for one of these standard permalinks and records that URL instead of whatever ephemeral URL you might be viewing at the time.

Again, wide adoption is unlikely because of the number of content providers out there. Plus, again, I don't know if this is possible or not.

All I know is this: I want to use Diigo for more than private annotations and for more than commenting into the void. I want to engage with other users and build a community and talk with those people (online). I also know that, as it stands, no social bookmarking service is truly effective at building communities of users talking about the same links.

Related posts:

1. Delicious or Diigo?
2. Social networking resolutions
3. Survey looks at social networking in the workplace
4. Legal issues from any form of social network screening
5. Dabblers go home; journalists need to be social media leaders