There aren’t many tech products I would consider myself dedicated to. I change browsers at least weekly, keep at least one Mac, one Windows machine and one Linux PC around at all times and a two-year cell phone commitment can seem like a prison sentence by month six.

I’m also not the kind of guy who gives glowing reviews, everything is usually tempered with a mix of good and bad, an attempt to find balance and deeper understanding.

But there is at least one service that I am truly grateful for, Diigo.

You see, when most people think of social bookmarking, they think of Delicious due to its popularity. However, for me and my specific needs, Diigo has been a savior, providing a much-needed service that’s simple, reliable and attractive.

If I’m going to rave about any service I use, Diigo would be it and as the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, I want to celebrate one of my favorite tech services and how much it has helped me.

Our work started out well. We read in class a section of Antigone, and that night, they annotated spots where they saw characters developing moral dilemmas (these dilemmas are our entry point into the play -- we will eventually write compare/contrast essays on modern moral dilemmas and what we can learn from ancient dilemmas -- more on that later!). Here is an example of one of their comment threads (with their typos and all!) on this quote from Antigone to Ismene, "Yes, I'll do my duty to my brother -- / and your as well, if you're not prepared to. / I won't be caught betraying him.

This is only one example of many where they read each other's ideas and built their own thoughts on them. I was thrilled. We started class the next day just skimming the play -- I asked them to notice who had a moral dilemma so far just by looking at where the annotations were. They could SEE that every character so far had some kind of dilemma. We were on a roll ...

Diigo is the first web 2.0 tool I shared with my new colleagues and they have *loved* it! We’re going to set up groups for each of our PLCs to share links and discussions.

see if you find Delicious slightly less delicious after using Diigo for a couple of weeks!

Once the students logged into their accounts they were mesmorized. I pulled up the Wikipedia page on the Dust Bowl which I had added sticky notes to. One student asked if students could add notes or comment on the notes that others have left. They started talking about all of the ways they see this being used in our classroom.

It was difficult to get me students to leave at the end of the day. A couple of them stayed several minutes after the end of the day to keep exploring.

However, Diigo is much more important than that to be relegated to a mere service that directs users to the outlandish, latest web page hype. There is a promise of research and community knowledge gathering that doesn't have much use for a Thumb up rating systems. They want to collaborate more intimately than that.

26) Hopefully you will already have at least one active social bookmarking account established.  Delicious, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, any of these will do. Open accounts on all three of these services.  Make Diigo your primary account for bookmarking. By doing this, you can use a Diigo feature that allows you to bookmark to all three services simultaneously.

And I was really happy to see your mention of diigo. While I still prefer delicious, diigo does allow you to bookmark to all three sites like you mentioned. When I first started doing that it was more for bookmark insurance - if one site disappeared my bookmarks would still exist somewhere else. Only later did I think of the social aspect of it.

Thank you. I'm glad to see more people using Diigo. It's really such an under valued tool. It has so many social aspects and features, that people tend to get intimidated and never use it to it's full potential.

The most pleasant surprises that I’ve had in this course is Diigo.  I’ve been a Diigo user for some time now, but this class is the first time where the ability to make public annotations to webpages has lived up to its potential.  It’s amazing to me to see discussions emerging in the margins of the articles I’m reading.  Diigo is perhaps the most profitable way that I’ve found to connect to insightful classmates.