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A better way to remember your online research April 15th, 2007 · No Comments How often have you found yourself scouring the web for information on a specific topic only to forget which websites you’ve visited and what information was valuable? That’s where I find myself a lot of times when I do online research. Whether that’s compiling a list of pros/cons for all the content management solutions out there to gathering data to write a paper, inevitably I forget something. You know how it is, you sit there and you scratch your head knowing there’s a reason you came to the conclusion you did, but can’t remember what it was. To everyone out there like feels my pain, I want to introduce you to Diigo. Here’s a brief rundown of what it does (as it relates to online research). Highlights text on web pages to make them stand out. Add comments to highlighted text or to the web page overall. Provides a central location to view all your highlights and/or comments.

And the cherry on top of all that is that there is no software installation required. All those features are easily accessible through a bookmarklet. If you prefer, there is a downloadable toolbar as well. The beauty of Diigo is that it documents your research. Before, I used to use a text editor. It was terrible. If I’d visit an interesting website, I’d make note of the URL, any interesting text, and any other tidbits I’d want to remember. Then I’d save it with some vague filename wherever the default save location was on my computer only to never find it again. And I call myself a tech-savvy.

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.