Del.icio.us was a big discovery for me. The ability to access my bookmarks anywhere, share them with others, and discover my friends’ favorites: Wow!

But I had a moment of truth the day I clicked a months-old bookmark only to discover that one of my favorite pages on Web design had vanished. D’oh! I’d really depended on that material! Suddenly apprehensive, I started going through all of my del.icio.us links one-by-one, discovering that a large percentage had vanished off the face of the Web.

It felt almost like I’d had a hard drive failure. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to depend on Web-based content.

Sure, for finding the odd missing page, there’s always Archive.org, but that saves pages intermittently and it’s a fairly clunky solution for an ongoing problem. What I really needed was a social bookmarking service that cached a full version of each bookmarked page with all the graphics and formatting intact.

Get Digging

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply.

(Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

But getting the most out of Diigo isn’t as simple as swapping out your del.icio.us quick bookmarks and moving on. Strategy counts.

Hmm interesting idea... It would be cool to see an idea like this be implanted to memestreams