It does the things you didn't realise you wanted Delicious to do, but now you've got a taste for those features, you don't really want to go back...

Diigo... me like! Have a look... see if you find Delicious slightly less delicious after using Diigo for a couple of weeks!

Diigo has long been a favorite tool of mine for bookmarking and collaboration. Diigo easily passes my criteria for adding a tool to my toolbox. The tools I use have to do a number of things beyond basic stability and usability:

1. Save time by automating manual stuff, or taking advantage of work I’m already doing.

2. The tool or mashup has to be easy and quick to use. One or two clicks, less than 30 seconds.

3. Foster real connection, collaboration and participation.

Now Diigo has added another reason to love them, integration with Wordpress, (and other blogging platforms).

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed.

I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more

Diigo groups are ideal for team research

If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private.

Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks

When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top.

Group sticky notes are great for discussion

When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context.

Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency

The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency.

Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this.

Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

In my early days of Living in the Clouds, I was using Delicious as my cloud based bookmarking tool. It was my favorite Web 2.0 era tool. I loved it so much that I refused to look at any other social bookmarking apps. When I started blogging here at Cloud Avenue, Zoli recommended us to use another bookmarking site called Diigo for our research purposes. I agreed to use this app very reluctantly and I never looked back since then.



Diigo is not just a social bookmarking site but it is also a very good research tool including options to highlight, annotate, comment, share, etc.. This tool has changed the way I do research on the web with its powerful set of features. In fact, I have stopped using Delicious completely. This is much more powerful than Delicious in my quest to organize my information in the clouds.

Pros:

• Highlight and Annotation. This is a powerful feature for anyone who is using Diigo for research purposes. The best part of this is the finer privacy control for annotation. One can keep it private or share with a group or make it public.
• Ability to create groups to share with others interested in a particular area or lists to organize information better for yourself.
• Ability to send to friends who are not members of Diigo through email.
• Ability to expand/collapse highlights and annotations in your Diigo bookmarks page.
• Powerful toolbar
• Ability to extract all the annotation in a particular page. Comes handy while researching on any topic. Here, the network effects can make this feature more powerful.

Cons:

• Lack of browser button that could hide/unhide the Diigo toolbar similar to Stumbleupon toolbar. This will come handy for those with smaller monitors/netbooks to use the space occupied by the toolbar to see the webpage.

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

I’ve been loving Diigo since I ditched Delicious a few months ago. They are constantly adding awesome features and today I stumbled on the groups feature. Basically it allows you to create a group of like-minded users (it can be public or private) to share links, comments and it has a forum baked right in.

This is HUGE… It allows you to create micro communities and adds much greater value to “social” bookmarking. You can be a part of multiple groups - which are often topical in nature. There are all kinds of different options that allow you to discuss bookmarks in comment threads and in a forum. There are RSS feeds for each group - so you don’t even have to join one to get some benefit. And there’s a great “slideshow” feature that will allow you to quickly lopp through the bookmarked sites.

the first great thing about Diigo is
that your bookmarks follow you wherever you go.  When you
bookmark a site using your Diigo account, you can have access to
it at work, home, the computer lab or library.  The other great
thing is that once you bookmark it, you can share your book mark
links with students and colleagues and they can all have access
to your sites.   

The next big plus to Diigo is that you get
to “tag” the sites you want to bookmark.  A tag is the
classification system you determine so you can organize your
bookmarks and find the link the next time you need it; this is
known as a folksonomy. 

On the sticky note the teacher
could ask questions and Diigo allows people to comment and reply
to the questions on the sticky note.  Students could also add
sticky notes for other students to comment on as well.  Another
way to use the highlighting tool is that students could go
through an article and highlight all of the vocabulary that they
didn’t know and learn what it means prior to reading the
article.  Or students could put sticky notes about questions
they have when reading the text. 

I decided to see what Diigo was and cannot believe what I was missing out on. With Diigo I can save pages, as I normally would but I can include tags, a description of the page, and even highlight the text on a page and save it all to my Diigo tab on my web browser. Looking back this tool would have be very helpful when look for research in on-line data bases for papers. There is also a social aspect of Diigo that I have not yet fully explored but from my knowledge lets you stay in touch with friends and meet new people with similar interests. I highly recommend checking out Diigo!