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.

I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes.

So far these are my thoughts:

1. I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool.
2. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet.
3. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class.
4. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term.
5. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc.
6. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.

f you ask me, Diigo is the best thing to come out of Web 2.0.

3. Diigo (www.diigo.com). I’m just beginning to use this tool and don’t understand it thoroughly yet. It’s a social networking tool, but more so for my purposes it’s a way to highlight and annotate web pages and save them for future reference. You can simply read a web page and highlight interesting points, or you can also attach “sticky notes” to help you remember what you thought as you were reading it. You can make your work private or share it with the world - your choice.

I’ve been hearing buzz about other ways to use Diigo, like for bookmarking. For me, though, I see two primary uses. One is for my personal scholarship. My job requires me to read a great deal, and more and more of the material is online. To avoid printing reams of articles and then having the problem of where to store them, I can use Diigo as a storage and organization system for my personal library.

A second use is for evaluation. My job also requires me to evaluate student work that often takes the form of web pages. (I’ve become quite addicted to Word’s powerful annotation features for assignments submitted in that format.) With Diigo, I can comment upon their work directly on the page and then share the feedback with the student privately. So far, the best way to do this seems to be to set up a group of two, but there may be better ways. You can also have Diigo collect your annotations and send them to a “Friend.” Think about the stacks of paper this process saves.

Jim,

I went to post this on Diigo and then hit my back space and went to a different page and lost everything boo… but I thought that I would post here instead.

I am becoming more enamored over time with Diigo. At first I didn’t get the hoopla… I don’t “do” facebooks and myspaces etc. and I have enough of a hard time keeping up with twitter (don’t know how coolcatteacher and Dembo follow 1000+ folks… ) so I didn’t think much of the social side. But it could host links and re-post them to delicious so not too bad… here is what is changing my mind.

1. Bookmarking… on one hand it is the same as delicious tags yadda yadda… but I can now tag a s ite, send it to friends in the diigo network and outside of it, forward it to a specific topic group and throw it into a specifically designed list at the same time! That is efficient in my mind. the Twit thing is neat too so I don’t have to tinyurl it and post to twitter… and I can even keep my delicious account updated through Diigo so I don’t have to do double work… (and when i imported it brough my delicious notes that was a nice touch)

2. Annotation/stikites/highlighting. We all research and move information into different places, google notebook, MS OneNote, Zoho Notobook… but those pieces of information are then only our notes and ideas… Diigo’s highlighint and annotation allows you to make any page a conversational document. That is powerful. I just played with it for the first time today and was blown away with ease at which you could do this. those notes can then be seen by any diigo user. The collaborative possibilities are astounding. if you have not tried this or seen it go to http://lisaslingo.blogspot.com and scroll down to the Best Day Ever post. If you have your Diigo sidebar open you will see two notes, and the Highlighing that Steve Kimmel did. Also, I don’t know if it is showing up yet I tagged a sticky note next to the first picture there… my comments appear in the side bar, but I see the note markup and I am thinking others will to eventually, but am not sure. Think of all the times your teachers ahve been trying to teach textmarking but can’t in the Textbooks… now we can do this to the web.

3. Diigo has shown a committment to listening to its users. Well at least the educational users, and they have been making small changes almost daily since Lisa Parisi held the elluminate session this past Sunday. Maggie Tsai and Wade Ren have been in and out of multiple conversations on Diigo and posting on edubloggers pages (Look up) to actively understand our needs and look to make changed in Diigo to fit the educational model… You can be offended by the “hate” comment Wade made, but this is his company and he wants to make change to satisify folks…

I really like delicious since I was introduced to it a year ago. Easy linking, I can tag from a tool bar with comments I can build a passive network… But Delicious is not listening to folks or making changes even though they “introduced” their version 2 about a year ago, and it has not appeared. Even the tech bloggers are taking delicious to task for this. The responsiveness that Wade and Maggie have shown so far is really impressive in my opinion.

Just wanted to share my thoughts on why I am continuing to investigate and use Diigo. I know that you feel a bit targeted for “not drinking the coolaid” but I think what you are getting hit hard on is if you don’t like the service you do not have to use it. Or with the participation Wade and Maggie are showing get involved and see if it can become what you would like to see…

Just my thoughts,

Scott

I admit that diigo has probably catapulted itself ahead of Zoho and twitter and is my favorite tool these days.

In conclusion, I’ve not seen any social networking tool that has sparked my imagination nearly so much as Diigo.

But it’s got me thinking. It is an interesting blend of human networks and social bookmarks, of people can content.

Perhaps this is what sets Diigo appart, that content becomes the place. It isn’t the place that’s the place. It’s the content.

Diigo is perhaps one of the web’s premier research tools - this is widely accepted.

Diigo as a tool, could be viewed as a much more serious innovation by comparison.

With the release of Version 3, Diigo has fairly effectively expanded its reach into the social networking venue even farther. Aside from that, the inherent tools available on Diigo as a aggregationa and research platform have been expanded greatly also. So many startups have been either hyped or constructively accentuated that it is sometimes difficult to put an actual value on them, this is not the case for any of Diigo’s faithful users.