Group items tagged

Write on Web pages 7/31/2006 SPONSORED BY E-Mail This Printer-Friendly Since I use the Internet so much for work, I'm always looking to get more from it. Fortunately, Web programmers are working away at improvements. When I research for my show, I often print out Web pages and make notes on them. That's such a waste of paper! I try to be as "green" as possible.

That's were diigo comes in. It allows you to make annotations directly on Web pages. It also helps you manage your bookmarks. You can make these public or you can keep them to yourself. It's a valuable tool! You'll need to sign up for an account. And you should try the toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer. There's a bit of a learning curve. But I think you'll find it worthwhile. diigo.com

Diigo To Launch Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 Research toolbox, diigo is going to introduce Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. The new Webslides widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format – complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. It can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also adds a new layer to the web by allowing any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. For more on the subject, see TechCrunch.

Diigo has long been a favorite tool of mine for bookmarking and collaboration. Diigo easily passes my criteria for adding a tool to my toolbox. The tools I use have to do a number of things beyond basic stability and usability: 1. Save time by automating manual stuff, or taking advantage of work I’m already doing. 2. The tool or mashup has to be easy and quick to use. One or two clicks, less than 30 seconds. 3. Foster real connection, collaboration and participation. Now Diigo has added another reason to love them, integration with Wordpress, (and other blogging platforms).

But honestly, even with their latest release - they have stopped innovating. I checked out Diigo on the recommendation of Mike Fruchter sometime ago via FriendFeed. Since signing up I hadn’t really used it. But, the latest update to delicious broke my Daily Digest series - which was the final straw. And since Diigo allows you to import from Delicious, there really is no switching costs for me. That being said I have been extremely happy with my Diigo experience. Here are six reasons Diigo is better than Delicious

1. It’s more socialDiigo has an extra level of social networking that Delicious does not provide - at least not in a usable manner. You can connect with people that have similar interests based on what you tag. 2. AnnotationsThe annotations feature is very cool. When you bookmark something, you can highlight notable sections to refer to later. And any other Diigo users can see your highlights when they visit the page if they have the toolbar installed. 3. Superior UI and ExperienceAside from all the snazzy features, the core “bookmarks” interface is much better than that of delicious - offering many additional features and better organization. 4. MicrobloggingThe microblogging feature in delicious never got a chance. This is the “daily post” feature that basically posts a digest to your blog of all the bookmarks you have saved over X amount of time. Delicious always had it as an “experimental feature”, for 3 years. Diigo does it so much better, allowing you to post only specific tags to your blog as well as providing more customization features. 5. DiscoveryNow, this is something that delicious did fairly well but is pretty much a product of its large community. But Diigo does a great job at it too, allowing you discover what’s hot across the network but also within a group of friends. It also has a “watchlist” feature that allows you to keep tabs on certain tags in the network. And last, it shows you a river of bookmarks from your network - with a neat tag cloud to see what your community is tagging the most. 6. Better ToolboxYou can import, export. There are widgets, linkrolls, and tagrolls. They offer several ways to interact with the service - through context menu, toolbars, bookmarklets. There’s a Facebook app. You can “save elsewhere” too. So, if you still want to post stuff to delicious (let’s say you have a great community there), you can set that up. What this does is posts your new bookmarks to the other services whenever you post them to Diigo.

All in all Diigo wins hands down. So ditch delicious, sign up, and join me.

Create a tagging schema taxonomy: (n) the study of the general principles of scientific classification If you've had anything to do with organizing information, you've heard this term.  In the web world, site managers spend weeks developing classification systems for their content so their search features will work properly.  Now for a new version - folksonomy.  Folksonomy is the same thing as taxonomy only without the education.  Folksonomy describes the grassroots classification systems developing as more and more "tag" platforms appear online.  While some  tags are appearing as standards, it's still quite a free-for-all out there. 

I use Diigo to manage my bookmarks.  Anytime I find a page I want to save, I tell Diigo to bookmark it for me using the tags I assign that page.   Later - when I want a list of all the genealogy blogs I've bookmarked - I just click on my "genblog" tag on my Diigo page to view them. Because I have included surname tags on all the family photos I've uploaded to Flickr, I can send anyone requesting Barker information one link that displays all my Barker photo collection. The related articles section at the bottom of this post was created using Diigo to display all the links I've saved related to a specific topic (tag).

Because I use these systems daily, I've created my own tag system - a folksonomy - that I use across each of the different tagging applications/platforms I use.  For genealogy items I use the following tags: genealogy (for everything genealogy) genblog (any blog dealing with genealogy topics) genapp (genealogy software) gendex (a genealogy index - like Cindi's List) genpub (a genealogy publication) gendata (a genealogy data source) surnames for each family I'm researching location names - city, county and state - for areas I'm researching Every tagging site allows multiple tags.  I bookmark every article I write beginning with my site tag (familymatters for this blog) and then topic specific tags.  That [and Diigo's tools] is how I'm able to collect my earlier posts for a related articles list.  It's so flexible that I can create a list of only my articles or any articles I've bookmarked with a specific topic keyword. Tags are becoming an important component of your research toolbox so spend a few minutes developing a plan - a folksonomy - of keywords for your research.  Anyone who's interested in developing a standard for genealogy tags, please let me know in the comments.  My tags are very handy for my research, but "our" tags can help us all!