Group items tagged

Karen has asked me to provide you all with more info on working with Diigo so that those of you who are a bit unsure about what you can do with it can get started. Below I’ve included some of its key features, but I strongly encourage you to visit their help menu, where you can access neat little flash tutorials on how to get started that are far better than anything I can whip up here. Some Diigo Features: Tagging: An easy, user-generated way to categorize and organize your bookmarks Annotation: write sticky notes that can be made public so you can interact and collaborate with others who are reading the same pages. Highlighting: Easy to highlight parts of pages, extract them, and collect them (great for research!) Groups: you can create public and private groups—a great way to organize group projects and add a level of privacy to Diigo that you may feel more comfortable with than making everything public. Privacy: Options for privacy are available on just about all Diigo features Search: You can search not just by tag name, but also titles, notes, highlights, and full text. Blogging Integration: “Blog This” feature allows you to move easily between browsing and blogging. Populate your blog post instantaneously with the highlighted texts you selected while reading a web page - a big time saver. Archiving: Allows you to save EXACT copies of bookmarked pages, which protects you from losing cool stuff that may disappear over time.   Photos: You can collect your favorite photos into albums Subscribe/Post Lists: Bookmark lists can be subscribed on the website and through RSS Community: find new content from specific users or based on tags, hot lists

Diigo is fantastic social bookmarking and proto-blogging tool, marrying the best of del.icio.us, the leading bookmarking site, and Google Notebook, a recently upgraded and highly flexible tool for interacting with and reviewing your websurfing experience. I didn't spend much time with Google Notebook once I discovered it by way of comparing del.icio.us with Google Bookmarks, but I played with it enough to notice a lot of excellent features that del.icio.us did not have, including the ability to automatically associate bookmarks with a current project, flexible blog-like layout for groups of bookmarks, and collaboration features. As I moved bookmarks into Google Notebook, I started to realize I would be missing out on some advantages of del.icio.us, such as strong interconnectivity through tagging and an exceedingly simple and crisp interface. Enter Diigo, which retains del.icio.us's advantages while sprucing it up with notetaking, tagging flexibility, and collaborative features that rival Google Notebook and then some. I compare these three approaches to bookmarking on four fronts: tagging, blogging, collaboration, and "other stuff".

Tagging: When I'm surfing, I almost never want to slow down to tag or detail the links I'm saving. I'm either just browsing, and I just want the page to be saved in some repository of "cool" somewhere I might be able to check it out later, OR I want to save the page and others to come back to for some project I'm working on. Although its actual tagging features (labelling) are limited, Google Reader was cool because it would automatically save links to the notebook I was currently working on, which seemed easier than having to tag the page every time I save for del.icio.us. Diigo isn't quite this easy, but it does provide the option of setting default tags so I can cruise through surfing without pause. It also allows you to change tags for multiple bookmarks at once, a feature that has been delayed in del.icio.us during the extended wait for version 2.0. Winner: Diigo

Blogging: Sometimes, I don't want to put a whole lot of thought into consolidating my links into one coherent group. In this regard, all three services provide suitable options for tossing together semi-coherent groups of links on independent webpages for others to see. Google Reader does a good job of making scraps from around the internet look palatable; see this example about ultralight backpacking gear, but it does not offer the same level of interconnectivity that del.icio.us or Diigo provide. A similar example from del.icio.us shows it's limitations: the links cannot be groups under one note or be put into any order other than alphabetical or chronological, and pictures and other non-bookmark material cannot be added. Diigo does not have any of these limitations: its lists can be ordered as you please and divided into sections, and they are built independently of the tags, so you can draw bookmarks from anywhere into the page, as you can see in this example. The option that makes Diigo stand out is its ability to transcend the status of "proto-blog" by easily exporting links to the blog of the user's choice. By simply selecting links and clicking "Send to Blog >>", a skeletal blog entry is started in Diigo which can be fleshed out and published on the spot. Winner: Diigo