Looking for Great Disney Content in One Spot? DisMarks to the Rescue!

When I first started finding Disney people on twitter and reading their blogs, I noticed a little icon on some of the posts: a little Cinderella castle with the word “mark it” underneath:  What is this? I thought and clicked it {ok, I’m not usually that click-happy on the internet, but it obviously looked legit}. I was then taken to DisMarks.com, so I checked it out. It looked like a “digg.com”-type site only ALL about Disney topics. What could be better? Well, DisMarks is on twitter and facebook, so the content gets tweeted and posted there as well!

How it works is you submit content (yours or other people’s)  and support other posts by “marking” them. DisMarks lists the most popular marks for current submissions on the main page, as well as upcoming posts. You can also search by topic or tag and comment to the posts submitted on DisMarks.  It’s a great way to get subject matter out to more people that may not have seen it otherwise – to pay it forward too. Actually, the site has a whole Getting Started page which explains the process much better!

In the spirit of my recent Disney Community posts, I wanted to share this wonderful service with you all. I thought I’d go right to the source and ask the creator of DisMarks to tell us just how the idea was born and what they hoped to accomplish with the site:

We feel that the Disney community is extremely influential on the internet, and that DisMarks is the perfect website to connect readers with bloggers and webmasters. Similar sites like Digg.com and Tipd.com have become very successful in the political and financial internet communities, and we knew we wanted to provide the same kind of online social network in the Disney community.

DisMarks was created as a result of two “frustrations” – one as a Disney fan and one as a webmaster.

As a Disney fan, there are hundreds of great blogs and websites in the Disney internet community, but there wasn’t a central location where everyone could share the articles, videos, and posts they really enjoyed. DisMarks not only gives everyone the chance to share cool links with other Disney fans, it also lets them vote for their favorites! And DisMarks ends up being *the* place to find Disney links that your fellow Disney fans find interesting on any given day.

As a webmaster, starting a new website, or sharing a veteran website with new readers, can be difficult. DisMarks gives webmasters an opportunity to share their best work with a community of Disney fans. It also allows webmasters to get real-time feedback as users post comments and vote for their favorite links. Items that are promoted to the front page get more views and better exposure, so your goal is always to have your articles voted to the top!

DisMarks is actually part of a larger strategy we’d love to see enacted fully throughout the Disney Community: Collaboration that benefits everyone. In a lot of internet communities, the webmasters worry about getting a bigger slice of the readership “pie.” But DisMarks is modeled after the financial community, where bloggers and webmasters have focused just as much on collaborating to make the readership “pie” bigger as they have on getting their piece.

By building a sense of collaboration, the community as a whole gets more attention and attracts avid readers who may not otherwise have ever ventured into the space. For example: If a new reader for any website is exposed to several other sites in the space, it’s not only more likely that the reader will become an active member of the community, it’s also likely that they’ll start reading more than just the one blog they originally landed on. Blog carnivals, link round-ups, and social media sites like DisMarks help create this sense of community and grow the “pie” for everyone. Plus, webmasters sharing ideas almost always ends up in more compelling and interesting posts for everyone in the community to read!

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Yep, DisMarks gets it! I’m extremely grateful for having a place that helped me get my foot in the Disney blogging door and hope that even more people make use of its services. I wanted to let everyone know that DisMarks has a blog carnival coming up on April 2nd and submissions are due by Tuesday, March 30th. Be sure to add your content to the DisMarks carnival and help spread the word!

Thanks to Jordan at DisMarks for sharing a bit of his Disney community philosophy will all of us. Look for that castle icon on posts and Mark It or head over to DisMarks.com and submit links there! {And thanks to all the DisMarks members that have marked my content over the past months!}