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Diigo (pronounced Dee’go) is a great social bookmarking site if you like to bookmark, highlight, put sticky notes (comments) on certain information you’re interested in when searching the web. Diigo is great for research. If you collect a lot of information like me, this is a great place to store everything. I know when I start to research a topic offline it usually means a tonne of books on the desk, bits and pieces of loose paper everywhere, writing pads, folders, paper, pens, highlighters. I think you get the image.  Diigo does all of the above and so much more online. And if that isn’t enough you can even blog from there too.  The tutorials are very clear and easy to understand.  I know I seriously sound like an infomercial right now but I think I’ve found a site I didn’t know I was looking for it.  Over the Easter break I’m locking myself away with a mission to learn how to drive it!

It seems as though every day I discover new search engines, bookmarking tools other Web applications that are intended to simplify the cluttered and overwhelming task of conducting Internet research. But let’s face it, most of these resources sound great in theory, but prove less effective in practice. Yet once in awhile I come across a tool that is inviting, intuitive and actually does what its mission statement says it will. Diigo is this type of tool. 

The catchy, quintessentially Web 2.0 name reads like a word from some obscure foreign language, but is actually an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff.” Though many enter the world of Diigo in a social networking frame of mind, the networking aspect is the core of the tool and only scratches the surface of Diigo’s capabilities. For teachers, a useful feature is the “watchlist,” which enables you to know what’s going on across the network through specific tags, for example “education” tags. The social annotation feature is the best way to collect and share online information from anywhere, and you can write about that information with the blogging feature! The first characteristic I look for in any tool designed to enhance productivity is usability; will using this save me time and effort? Diigo passes the “usefulness test” with flying colors. Plus, it has all of the information that’s important to you and allows you to share it with others educators. Perhaps this is what the author of the blog I’m Not Actually a Geek meant when he said, “It has changed the scope of what it means to be social.”

Diigo is a social annotation and networking service. It is combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media. I just registered Diigo, I have time to know more features. It is free but need invitation for register.

Diigo rocks, web annotation is here Filed under: General Web annotation — Josh @ 6:46 am After a few monts of use now, Diigo has replaced any other methods of bookmarking. I don’t use Firefox bookmarks anymore. I only us del.icio.us if I want a non-browser interface to my book marks. In my last post about Diigo I said I liked it but I’d post my complaints next post. Since then they’ve fixed everything I was going to complain about. The interface for editing your bookmarks used to be clumsy and hard to find, but they’ve totally remedied that. I was going to complain that the dispay of your tags was sad and ask if we could get a display of our tags as a tag cloud. Before I got the chance to suggest it, I logged in and found I had that option. I’m really liking Diigo and finding it useful. I am printing fewer hard copies of articles. I used to print copies to highlight and annotate them. I’m doing more and more of my highlighting and annotation on Diigo. My primary constructive criticism is that it would be nice to have some non-browser interfaces to the data. For example, the option that del.icio.us gives you to embed a tag cloud of your del.icio.us tags in any web page. That kind of functionality would make Diigo indespensible to me.

Diigo is an incremental evolution in human-information interaction. It combines web annotation, which I’ve written about several times, with the social construction of knowledge. It embraces tagging and social bookmarking, as many now are, and extends it to the next step, social annotation. Diigo’s online service approach addresses several problems of web browsing. First, how do I preserve this information I’ve found on the web? You bookmark it. But what if the page moves or is removed? With Diigo, when you bookmark, a copy of the page is saved on Diigo’s servers. Now that I’ve found and saved the page, how do I interact with it? Our model is how we interact with paper documents; We highlight and we make notes. Diigo enables you to both highlight and add notes. That stuff is great, but it gets better. Diigo allows you to make your annotations public. A user of the service see’s the public annotations of other Diigo users. In the future, Diigo will allow the creation of groups. With Google’s PageRank and with social tagging, we find information by the wisdom of the crowd, by word-of-mouth. With Diigo it is now easier than ever to share our collective thoughts on that information-our interpretations, extensions, criticisms and associations. Bringing us full circle, Diigo allows you to tag your bookmarks, and see the tags of other Diigo users. More help finding the information, the comments, and then adding your own. It’s a positive feedback loop.

The good: Diigo imports bookmarks from elsewhere; tags pages by topic; lets you mark up and share Web pages; has a simple interface; toolbar and bookmarklet allow quick bookmarking; bookmarks simultaneously to rival services; searches text and comments within bookmarks. The bad: Diigo's subscription features are under construction; doesn't automatically merge similar tags; doesn't preview bookmarked pages. The bottom line: Diigo lets you save, import, tag, highlight, mark up and share Web pages--offering more advanced research tools than Del.icio.us.

THe New sCHoLarsHiP aNd eMerGiNG forMs of PubLiCaTioN Time-to-adoption Horizon: four to five Years The time-honored activities of academic research and scholarly activity have benefited from the explosion of access to research materials and the ability to collaborate at a distance. At the same time, the processes of research, review, publication, and tenure are challenged by the same trends. The proliferation of audience- generated content combined with open-access content models is changing the way we think about scholarship and publication—and the way these activities are conducted

Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through nontraditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration.

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work. Blogging scholars report that the forum for airing ideas and receiving comments from their colleagues helps them to hone their thinking and explore avenues they might otherwise have overlooked.

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!