Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

For online services, the importance of developing user-friendly and accessible Web sites is of paramount importance. This article is about user testing

usability testing was carried out prior to a planned redesign

A questionnaire does introduce a certain level of artificiality

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.

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (www.judsoncollege.edu). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (www.diigo.com). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.

Diigo

AASL Releases Best Web Sites for Teaching and Learning

Web sites singled out by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL)

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!

Har du blitt fan av å ha bokmerkene på nett, tipser vi deg også om noen alternative tjenester til Delicious. Det finnes en haug av dem, men her er et lite utvalg:

Diigo - Etter nyheten om Delicious har jeg selv gått over til Diigo, som byr på så og si det samme som Delicious, men med en god del ekstrafunksjonalitet. Blant annet finnes det apps både til iPhone, iPad og Android, det er mulig å lagre tekstutklipp, merke tekst på nettsider, lagre snapshots (ikke tilgjengelig på gratisversjon), "les senere"-funksjonalitet og mer til. Tjenesten støtter også direkte import av Delicious-bokmerkene dine ved at du laster opp fila du hentet ut fra Delicious' eksport-funksjon. Under ser du en video som demonstrerer hvordan Diigo fungerer:

Every so often you come across a service that really fits into your life. Diigo is that for me. I never understood what the excitement was over sites like delicious. I never saw any practical use for it. However, I see many uses for Diigo. A big one for me is how you are able to use it as a research and knowledge tool and how it will allow me to be more time efficient. For one of my freelancing jobs, we talk a lot over email since we are all over the country. I hate when I find a cool article and then I have to send it to each person (I am still trying to figure out how to make email lists on Gmail). This service would allow me to bookmark the article and each person on my team can then decide if it pertains to them (instead of me trying to figure that out). You can set up different groups too. My personal group wouldn’t have to wade through my work bookmarks. Another feature that I love is that you can highlight articles and leave notes for yourself. Currently, I have a ton of bookmarks that I did, and I can’t remember what was important in those articles and why I bookmarked them. When doing research, I would love to be able to note that I have already looked at different web pages.

On the more personal side, there are several features that are just fun to play with. First, you have People Like Me. That feature will show you what other people who have bookmarked the same site as you also bookmarked. It will also suggest people that are close to you in your bookmarking behavior. You are able to import your bookmarks from other sites, so you don’t have waste your time doing that again.

It is a tad overwhelming at first when you are trying to figure it all out. However, it is worth your time.

Use Multiple Services