Group items tagged

Social search has a brand new contender - Diigo Currently social search appears to be the hottest topic on the internet. The theory is that more useful and meaningful search results can be gathered regarding the true value of sites by getting users to recommend websites rather than utilising a series of computer generated algorithms.Traditional search engine results, such as those supplied by Google and Yahoo!, are primarily based on objective criteria such as counts of the backlinks from other sites. These links are seen as votes on the importance of that page for a given set of criteria. Social search allows users to assign their own votes regarding which sites are worthwhile, by sharing bookmarks of favourite sites, adding their own subject tagging, or making annotations to listings. This creates a more subjective set of results, which some feel can more accurately reflect which sites are most meaningful for particular search terms. The concept of social search has been continually evolving since social bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Shadows first appeared through to more involved services such the social networking sites MySpace and MyWeb, or the social news source Digg.Now a new player has appeared on the scene. Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) which was launched on Monday aims to combine a number of features such as shared bookmarking, blogging and web page tagging into a single service along with a powerful toolbar search tool.Diigo promotes itself as an online social research and "social annotation" tool, allowing users to:"Collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere”. By letting users quickly create their own comment on sites as well as highlight, clip or make sticky-notes for webpages, and providing access to organic search or their own social search results, which can be adjusted to suite the users preferences, Diigo has created a service with several interesting resource sharing and community promotion features. By taking onboard search features normally associated with search toolbar extension filters such as the ability to restrict keyword searches to the site you're currently viewing, the usability of the search functions have been increased to make this a useful service regardless of whether the user is looking to fully immerse themselves in the online social environment.While there is currently no direct official link between social search results and organic results obtained on the traditional search engines, many users have recently started to find information from the likes of MySpace creeping in. With Google and Yahoo! both having their own networks it looks likely that more of the features and results will either be merged together or be offered alongside each other so that you can get different sets of results depending on your preferred search method.Whether Diigo is here to stay or is set to quickly disappear like many other social search sites, remains to be seen, however the simple customisable interface and powerful set of useful tools make this one of the best offerings for some time.

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

Level 4: Individual, Networked, Social Interaction with Content (Me to We with Museum) This is the level where web 2.0 sits. Individuals still do their interacting with the content singly, but their interactions are available for comment and connection by other users. And the architecture promotes these connections automatically. For example, on Netflix, when you rate a movie highly, you don’t just see how others have rated it; Netflix recommends other movies to you based on what like-minded viewers also rated highly. By networking the ratings, tags, or comments individuals place on content, individuals are linked to each other and form relationships around the content. A successful level 4 experience uses social interaction to enhance the individual experience; it gets better the more people use it. The social component is a natural extension of the individual actions. Which means, perhaps, users are ready for…

As always, comments are encouraged—and in this case, strongly desired as I work on refining this content for the article.

using web 2.0 to promote civic discourse in museums, I’m developing an argument about the “hierarchy of social participation.” I believe that, as with basic human needs, experience design in museums (and for other content platforms) can occur on many levels, and that it is hard to achieve the highest level without satisfying, or at least understanding, those that come before it. One of the impediments to discourse in museums is that fact that designers want to jump straight from individuals interacting with content to interacting with each other. It’s a tall order to get strangers to talk to each other, let alone have a meaningful discussion. And so, I offer the following hierarchy of social participation.

Too many social networks. Too many social bookmarking services. Social networks haven’t been around all that long, but already they have some negative associations. Social networks are black holes for sucking time, or, do I really need one more social network to add my information to and try to maintain? But just because the word ‘Social’ is in the same breadth as bookmarking, doesn’t mean that using a social bookmarking service is anything like your Facebook’s and your MySpace’s. There are a lot of choices for sharing links out there, Delicious, Magnolia, Diigo, Furl, Blinklist and many other options and variations. I started out using Delicious, and briefly used Blinklist. But Diigo blows every competitor out of the water because it is more robust and built will groups in mind.

As a collector, my knowledge of repair and restoration is in it’s infancy stage. I am a creative thinker and don’t easily understand schematics and electrical design. Reading articles written by experts on these subjects are like pulling teeth, I want the imformation I need, and I want it now. I have better things to do. So, what if I could find a resource on monitor repair and have the section already highlighted that might be of particular interest? That is just one of the many features of Diigo, highlighting and annotations. What if I want follow another collector who I know is an expert at restoration, like Brian Jones? Well, let’s say Brian had an account and he was adding bookmarks, I could then browse what he was adding and his annotations and pick up some helpful insights into arcade cabinet restoration that I wouldn’t have had before. Instead of one person searching for information, now it’s two. Add in a whole community of users and you have a very target user base of information. The possibilities are limitless.