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Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class 31 07 2007 A good friend of mine, Randy Lyseng, has been telling people of the tremendous power and educational value that can be gained from social bookmarking in the classroom. His personal favourite is Diigo. My preference is a social bookmarking tool called http://diigo.com. With diigo, you can highlight, add stick notes and make your comments private or public. (Randy Lyseng, Lyseng Tech: Social Bookmarking, November 2006) After listening to Randy praise Diigo at every opportunity, I finally started playing with the site (and corresponding program, more on that in a bit) this summer (I know Randy - I’m slow to catch on…)As I started to play with the system, my mind started reeling with all the possibilities. First off, like any other social bookmarking tool, Diigo allows you to put all your favorites/bookmarks in one “central” location. Students can access them from ANY computer in the world (talk about the new WWW: whatever, whenever, where ever). They just open up your Diigo page, and there are all the links. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Diigo’s power lies in it’s group annotations. That’s right, people can now write in the margins of webpages. You can highlight passages of interest, write notes, and even write a blog entry directly from another webpage, quoting passages right from the original text. Sounds great - but to do all that it must be complicated right? Nope. To use these advanced features all you need to do is run the Diigo software. This can either be done using a bookmarklet or by downloading and installing the Diigo toolbar. While both have basically the same features, the toobar is less finicky, and allows you to use contextual menus to access features quickly. I also find the toolbar’s highlighting and sticky notes to be easier to read. Ok fine… I can leave notes on webpages - so what? Here’s an example. I’m thinking about having my 7B’s record radio plays. I’ve looked them up online and found many scripts from all the old classics available. However many also contain the old endorsements from tobacco and other companies. So I go to a play that I’d like to my students to record and highlight the old commercial. If they’re using diigo when they access this page they’ll see the same text highlighted in pink, and when they mouse over the highlighted text they’ll get a hidden message from me - “I’d like you to write a new advertisement for this section. What other advertisement do you think we could write for here? Write an ad for a virtue or trait that you think is important. For example - “Here’s a news flash for every person in Canada. It’s about a sensational, new kind of personality that will make you the envy of all those around you. It’s call trustworthiness. Why with just a pinch of this great product….” They now have a writing assignment to go along with the recording of the radio play. Adding assignments is just one possibility. You can ask questions about the site, or have students carry on conversations about the text. Perhaps about the validity of some information. These notes can be made private (for your eyes only), public, or for a select group of people. You could use the same webpage for multiple classes, and have a different set of sticky notes for each one! Diigo will also create a separate webpage for each group you create, helping you organize your bookmarks/notes further! This technology is useful for any class, but I think is a must have for any group trying to organize something along the lines of the 1 to 1 project. I’m hoping to convince all the core teachers to set up a group page for their classes, and organize their book marks there! I’ve already started one for my 7B Language Arts Class! One of the first questions I was asked when I started looking at this site, and more importantly at the bookmarklets and toolbar was is it secure? Will it bring spyware onto our systems? How about stability? I’ve currently been running the Diigo bookmarklet and toolbar on 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (sorry, there’s no Safari toolbar yet), across 4 different computers and 2 different platforms with no problems. I’ve also run every virus and spyware scan I can think of, everything checks out clean. I’ve also done an extensive internet check, and can’t find any major problems reported by anyone else. To my mind it’s an absolutely fantastic tool for use in the classroom. Thanks Diigo! And thanks Randy for pointing me in the right direction!

Take your time to read the opening to the story below. Your job is to respond in two ways. 1 - Add a sticky note, using the Diigo toolbar, under your picture or name and  explain how you feel about this opening. 2 - Highlight some text and comment on part of the opening you enjoyed or want to talk about. Add you initials to your comments.

On Reflection  This activity was easy to set up - it is basically a page of text, the key thing is to have the Diigo toolbar (and class account) ready to roll. It can be done with a whole class using a computer suite for a literacy lesson, different children looking at different texts. The texts could also be in the public domain and they do not need to be narrative even. If you are looking at persuasive text why not look at the Alton Towers site and get the children to add Sticky Notes with their comments about how persuasive the site is. It could also be extended beyond popular fiction to include peer reviewing of children’s work they have published. (Lots to explore here I think) We worked between classes separated by a corridor but there is no reason why schools from anywhere could collaborate in response to a story or text. Given the right preparation and equipment I think this is a most manageable activity within a literacy independent session. My children had looked at Sticky Notes before but never added them independently - they catch on very fast and coped without any problems. Diigo with its “Highlight and Comment” tool can easily become a very useful online text annotation / response tool and I think I will keep using it.

I am pleased to welcome Diigo into my toolkit on a permanent contract :) all these ideas have been simmering for a while now and it is excellent to have the opportunity to see the children engaging and responding to text in this unique way.

Diigo has released v 3.0 of its browser plugin and has set a new standard in social bookmarking in the process. It not only allows you to bookmark and save notes in an easy to retrieve place, it adds a new dimension to the Web itself by revealing, at the page level, the community of people who have also interacted with the content. It also feeds into a bigger community of content that builds a social network around relevant information. It combines research and community.

Starting simple: You can bookmark and annotate relevant things that you need to reference later. Using the Webslides function, you also can share these links as a slideshow, which actually appear as “live” web pages. The slideshow is embeddable on Web pages and in blogs. Revealing a new layer of the web: The new sidebar gives you quick access to your bookmarks as well your annotations on each Web page. It also shows you other diigo users who have annotated that page to give you additional perspective. The sidebar is searchable to find your notes quicker and easier. Connect and Engage: According to the company, you are what you annotate. Bookmarks, tags, and annotations are one of the best representations of your interests and expertise. At Diigo, you maintain a bookmarks page which is your hub to relevant content. You can also connect to like-minded people and also browse their activities as they relate to you.

Diigo goes beyond all of that.  You can comment on links, thus enabling conversation.  This is sorely missing from del.icio.us and it is weakly implemented in Mag.nolia.  You can schedule a link post to your blog or simply post a link directly.

Though most will likely give a collective groan to a new bookmarking site, if you aren’t using Diigo you might as well be living in a web 1.0 world.

Diigo does have a couple items I would like to see worked out.  First of all they didn’t get the memo that we have reached the mobile tipping point.  I would love to see an iPhone version of this so I can use it on the go.  Where is the API?  How can you have a service in today’s market place without an API.  Finally, trackbacks.  Let me carry the conversation back if I can.  So many social sites don’t implement this and it seems vital to enabling a conversation.

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

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.

Diigo: the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife July 24th, 2006 Just as PC World predicted, the bookmarking / social annotation powerhouse known as Diigo announced their public launch today. While others have been quick to launch a legion of bookmarking sites that are all nearly identical to one another, Diigo’s developers have taken the time necessary to produce the most substantive collection of annotation, blogging, and research tools available under one roof. Those who think that Diigo is “just another” bookmarking site are in for a big surprise when they start to explore the real capabilities of this little beast. When I first mentioned Diigo back in February, I stated that my favorite feature was the ability to bookmark across multiple platforms (such as Binklist, Furl, RawSugar, etc.) but what I didn’t realize is that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. “What are these great features?” you’re asking. Let’s take a look at some of them. First of all, the key to unlocking the secret world of Diigo is the toolbar. This tiny piece of software allows the whole of the internet to become an interactive work station. While the toolbar contains the standard bookmarking and search features you would expect, it also allows you to use the real gem of this suite: the Content Selection Menu. The Content Selection Menu is an innocent-looking little drop down menu that appears whenever you highlight some text (this feature can be turned on or off via the options menu on the toolbar.) The menu contains three categories of sub-menus: Diigo, Search, and Copy.

The Diigo sub-menu allows you to highlight selected text or to blog the text with Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, or Typepad. The highlight can be set to either public or private visibility. The private highlighting is particularly useful if you’re doing any sort of research that involves keeping track of bits of information from all over the web. The public highlighting is great for annotating web pages with “sticky notes” that other Diigo users can see when hovering over the highlighted text. One more important feature here is the ability to forward the web page without having to go through the trouble of composing an email to do it. So in one fell swoop you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, and forward without ever having to leave the web page. (One minor correction: the highlighting does not become publicly visible unless a public Sticky Note has been attached.) In the Search sub-menu you will find the ability to search your selected text across a potentially infinite number of search engines and online resources. The stock search menu comes loaded with about ten categories, each containing multiple resources. Whether you want to search a standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo, a blogging resource such as Technorati, News, Shopping, Music, Bookmarking sites, they’re all there, and much more. In addition, the search menu is fully cusomizable. Don’t need a certain category? No problem, just delete it. Want to add you own category? That’s no problem either. You can add, remove, and rearrange ’til your heart’s content. The Copy menu is short and sweet. And I do mean sweet! As much as I love all of the other features Diigo has to offer, this is quite possibly the one “must have” feature that seals the deal for me. This sub-menu has only two offerings: Without format, and With format. Anyone who has needed to cut & paste text from a web site into a blog entry, email, or word processing document should know the frustration of having to unformat the text in order to make it usable in your document. I had gotten to the point of just keeping Notepad open in order to quickly (and I use that term very loosely) unformat text before pasting it into my documents. Now with a single click I can strip the text of its formatting, making it ready to insert into the document of my choice. Like I said…sweet! I could go on and on about the wonders of Diigo, but you really aren’t going to gain a full appreciation for it until you give it try yourself. If all of these features (and I didn’t even cover them all) seem a little overwhelming, don’t worry. There is an extensive help section to guide you through. Why wait for Web 2.0 to come to your favorite sites when you can carry this cutting-edge tool wherever you go? Posted by Reginald Freeman

a crowded space - Ma.gnolia, eSnips, Jots, Fungow, SpinSpy, Simpy, RawSugar are just a few of the players here.

Diigo aims to create a better social bookmarking tool.

Once again, I think it’s a case of too little, too late.

A few weeks back I managed to score an invite to a new social bookmarking/annontation site called diigo. I am quite excited by the potential of a service such as this and its really starting to realise some of the oppourtunity out there. Essentially diigo lets you bookmark pages, tag those bookmarks, add comments to those bookmarks, highlight content within pages, add comments to those pages that are viewable by all diigo users and utilise all the community features your used to like subscribing to your friends lists. Thats not a list of features that springs out of the page, many of these ideas have been attempted previously. Its more the deftness that diigo handles these ideas with that makes it stand out from the pack. Theres also the fact that its all bundled into one service.

the best way to sum up a service like diigo is that it overlays a Web 2.0 service on top of Web 1 sites. Things like tagging, annotation, social bookmarking and social commenting are very Web 2.0 in nature. diigo allows you to apply these ideas to normal Web 1 style sites.

Take, for example the BBC News site. Theres an awfull lot of content on there, some of which I would be interested in the thoughts of others on. Currently only certain, carefully chosen stories feature comments. diigo, however, allows you to comment on these stories, furthermore you can highlight actual pieces of text within the story and comment on them. And then others can view your comments and add their own. It is possible to have a linear conversation based around single web pages or even paragraphs of content. When you take the potential of the above and add in a competant social bookmarking service you can begin to see where diigo is heading as a service. The diigo team are aware that there are numerous other services out there, the one that is certainly a huge obstacle in terms of social bookmarking is del.icio.us, a service that I absolutely love. To make the transition a bit easier you can import your bookmarks into diigo from del.icio.us, you can also automatically add your diigo bookmarks to del.icio.us