Aaron, I’ve been watching some of your bookmarking explorations and more closely contemplating some of my own. For “publicizing” the original link there are a few things you can do. I know you’ve come across my use of the PressForward plugin. It does a solid job of pulling in the entire post, which you’re bookmarking/liking/favoriting/etc., and allowing you to forward to the original canonical URL by setting an auto-forward time within the plugin. This allows you to syndicate your bookmark/like/favorite/other out to places like Twitter, Facebook, et al. and then when users click on those links, they go to your website which then in turn forwards them back to the original. This is much like the way linkblogs worked in the early 2000’s (John Gruber/Daring Fireball was one of the first to do this as I recall) and is pretty similar to the way some bookmarking sites like Diigo or Reading.am work to forward you to content. When I checked last there were a few linkblog-esque plugins in the WordPress repo that did similar things, though none that did exactly what I wanted them to. Since the code is all open source though, you could extract the portions you need and bend them to your will if you liked/needed.

Another option is to set the canonical URL for your post to that of the original you’re bookmarking, which will push the “credit” to the original. Some popular plugins like All In One SEO Pack allow you to do this. PressForward goes one step further and physically redirects people from your permalink to the original.

One of the things I liked about PressForward and syndicating out was that it allowed my site to garner the traffic and referral links to the things I bookmarked as well as to collect the webmentions and potential conversations from social silos. Because my original post always forwarded, those conversations were only viewable (by the public) on the silos and not my site. I suppose sometimes you’ve got to take what you can get.

I’m sure there are solutions beyond this, but there haven’t been many experimenting with them lately to my knowledge. Welcome to the bleeding edge!

Syndicated copies: