Group items tagged

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply. (Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

Use Diigo for static pages with useful content. Here are some suggested uses from my own Diigo love affair: Research. Why bother copying and pasting articles you’ll be using in your next paper or presentation when you can add them to a searchable database in one click? Publicity. If you have a blog, podcast, or other promotable work, you’ll want to clip all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. Diigo’s perfect for quickly and easily capturing those mentions for posterity and, since it’s shareable, you can show off your best clips in a snap. Want List. It’s not really a resolution, but I do plan to cut down on my expenditures in 2008, and one way that’s always worked well for me in the past is creating a “want list.” When I see a nifty notebook or gadget or safety razor I want to buy, I add it to the want list with the date. 30 days later, if it still sounds awesome, I’ll buy it. But often my enthusiasm for that nifty cable wrap I saw on Cool Tools has waned and I’ve saved twenty bucks. Lifehacks. Obviously. If you’re like me, you’re constantly gathering tips and advice on productivity and technology from around the Web. Save them here and go over them periodically to see which ones actually worked in practice and which were quickly forgotten. Recipes. Several recipe sites let you aggregate your favorites, but if you get your recipes from multiple sites, you can use Diigo to keep them all in the same place. Blogging. One of the big advantages of a social bookmarking service is the social part. Diigo makes it easy to share your links, post them to your blog, or even do an automatic daily post of links to your site.

In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked: “Is it really that easy?” “It sure is.” I replied.

Students Use Social Bookmarking Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

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.

Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation: the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed. Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments. The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo. The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page wisely noted: Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick. This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available. On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference. All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services. My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community. Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you. Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article. There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities. The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice. Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools 11.13.2006 @ 11:07 AM — Filed under: Social Bookmarking

It is great to see the wiki philosophy in TrailFire (partially) applied. My suggestion is: what about WikiWords (like the last one),i.e. automatic links to a dedicated Wiki for each trail. In the same sense each mark should be individually addressable via an URL as a wiki-page. Another more powerful option would be a global TrailFire community wiki, which would be a common database for making rich link context supported marks. Thank you for making TrailFire available as very helpful community service that brings our planet on a new level of togetherness. Posted by fridemar | May 11, 2007 3:31 PM

Glad you like the wiki features. We have definitely thought about expanding the wiki-ness (or at least, the ability of the author to enable wiki-ness) in some of the ways you mention. We'll be continuing to add features that make it easy to collaborate on projects around a trail or set of trails, with a group of contacts or with the world at large. Posted by Mike Perkowitz | May 11, 2007 4:10 PM