Diigo Community

There are so few secrets on the web. Your competitor’s positioning, key benefits, product descriptions, and sometimes even their secret recipe may be readily available . . . right on their website. However, so few companies spend any time looking at what their competitors display in public. Try using Diigo to bring together your team and track what’s important and what changes on your competitors’ sites. As they put it, Diigo is about social annotation - it lets you and your team highlight, annotate, share & interact on any webpage. Simply set up a profile, invite your colleagues to join, and then you can simply visit your competitors’ sites (or any site) and make highlights or add sticky notes wherever you like. It’s remarkably easy to set up, as you can see from this little example from one of our favorite sites. When was the last time you visited your main competitor’s web site?

Denise Olson from Family Matters and Moultrie Creek commented about her Genealogy Research Resources at Diigo.  I finally visited, registered at Diigo, and joined Denise's group.  Once I joined, I was amazed at all of the resource links Denise has accumulated.  As of this morning, there are 624 bookmarks and usually multiple links within each bookmark.  It's too early in the morning, and I haven't had enough coffee, to focus enough and count all the links, but take my word for it - there are lots. 

All of the bookmarks are tagged by general subject so it's easy to find the your area of interest.  The best part of Diigo and the Genealogy Research Resources group is it's a collaborative environment - if you have some unique resource links you can add them to the group so everyone can make use of them.  I think this is an incredible site, and Denise has put great effort into creating and adding most of the current links. 

In my during-semester survey, a few students offered the following comments about Diigo when asked what had helped them learn in the course: The Diigo annotation technology has made reading the court cases far more enriching. It as though you are in the room while I am reading the cases.... I wish there were a way you could do the same for all the other readings. It really helps to bring clarity to the court cases by reading your comments. I would be confu[s]ed on some judgements or miss important points without the comments. It is the next best thing than [to] sitting in a lecture and discussing interpretations.

Diigo- I’ve been using diigo and Mister Wong for social annotation, but mainly have used Diigo.

At the University of South Florida, Prof. Sherman Dorn is using Diigo, a social annotations tool, to guide students through the legalese. His shared notes can tell students what to linger over, or skip; imagine the time they can save on their reading. Diigo, which lets you "collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere," is also in use at other schools. Developers claim a unique mix of features. Check out a video demo.

Diigo un del.icio.us puissance dix ! Si vous connaissez del.icio.us, vous auriez tout intérêt à essayer Diigo. Ces deux services Web ont comme base les signets sociaux. Par contre Diigo va beaucoup plus loin, en permettant entre autres la création de notes sur vos signets, d’annoter des pages Web, de collaborer en échangeant des commentaires à même les signets.

It reminded me of the the review tools in Microsoft Word which I've used a few times with students - someone sends me a Word document and I add comments and suggested edits. The review tools can track changes I make as well as highlighting sections and adding notes in the margin. I can then send the annotated Word document back to the author and a conversation grows around the original document and our comments. When I first started using this feature of Word, I thought it would be great if you could do that with web pages. Imagine being able to get a class of students to collaborate on a web page: to highlighting sections, share their understanding, ask questions and add extra information. With diigo, that's exactly what you could do.Add to that online social bookmarking (which can be linked to other bookmarking services such as del.icio.us), the ability to highlight any text on a page and search for it on a range of search services using a pop-up menu, to blog about a page and link non-diigo users to your annotations on that page (this blog posted was created using the diigo Blog this tool) and a host of other features ...and you have a stunningly valuable educational tool.

I have also found Diigo to be quite an exciting tool and this year my year group is in a better position to use it. I structured it into an independent activity during a literacy hour with my Year 5 children. Using Diigo I annotated a set of written instructions with comprehension style questions and the children answered them in their jotters. The children were accessing the site using a class set of laptops. I wanted them to respond someway online but took a simpler step to begin with to test the concept. It worked very well and the children were well motivated and on task - they managed well with the new tool and took it in their stride.

Here’s how: use Diigo. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway. Diigo now allows us to leave annotations (”stickynotes”) on web pages that are not attached to any highlighted texts, but just float on the page as a little yellow speech bubble. So I’m going to put a private, floating stickynote on each student blog’s homepage telling me the privacy levels chosen for him or her. It looks like this:

–hover over the speech bubble, and it shows you your annotation, eg.: “full name, pictures, videos okay, self-moderated comments,” or whatever. So here’s the letter. If anybody wants to suggest changes, or collaborate on them, I’m all ears.

Day 1 - 6th November - An Introduction to Web Design Here are the tasks for Day 1: Task 1 - Reviewing websites Using the tools from Diigo.com, you will review one website from the following list. Review the site based on the following criteria - usability, accessibility, use of images, quality of text / content and navigation. Highlight sections of the page that you wish to comment upon, and add sticky notes using the Diigo toolbar to record your opinions. The sites to choose from are: Wolverhampton City Learning Centre Wolverhampton Wanderers BVS Performance Systems Tally Ho Uniforms Oceanside High School Class of 1960 (added 06/11/07) Here is an image from Diigo showing student comments added to the Tally Ho Uniforms site:

Section 3.10　「ソーシャル・アノテーション」Diigo Section 3.11　Diigoで情報を整理する Section 3.12　メール・ブログとDiigoを組み合わせる Section 3.13　Diigoと他のSBMを組み合わせる

A program I’m finding incredibly useful at the moment is Diigo. It’s an online bookmarking service, which allows you to annotate and highlight webpages. It’s at last solved the problem of what I do with interesting websites and articles, other than just let them pile up in the “Favourites” section of Internet Explorer. Now I can easily find any webpage that I have bookmarked, and not only find it but also see the bits I found especially interesting with any comments that I made.That’s only scratching the surfuce of what Diigo can do. This video will give you a much better idea than I can describe in a short posting:

Realmente cuando uno explora los recursos 2.0 se da cuenta de aquella trillada frase de que el día debería tener más de 24 horas. Leo en educ.ar Nuevas herramientas para potenciar las redes sociales y conozco Diigo. Paso siguiente, lo instalo y a probar un nuevo marcador social con agregados. La pregunta que uno se hace es para que, si con del.ici.us nos llevamos de maravillas. Quizás la respuesta está sobre el final del artículo: “Algunos utilizamos determinadas herramientas, otros se deciden por otras. Tal vez de eso se trate. Desde envidadigital.net lo resumen así: “En esto de la web 2.0 uno no se puede casar con nadie. En este contexto podríamos decir que la infidelidad 2.0 es una virtud necesaria. He concluido que soy un polígamo 2.0. Me refiero a que no puedo quedarme con un solo marcador social, tengo que ser fiel a varios de ellos“.”

Diigo www.diigo.com Diigo is my personal favorite for social bookmarking. Users can not only import del.icio.us or other bookmarks, they can also update those other services using diigo. In addition, diigo’s informational video and screencasts—accessible on its home page—provide a great introduction to social bookmarking. Diigo’s secondary features include a rich set of browser tools that allows users to highlight passages and leave comments on Web pages for other diigo users to see (a great way for teachers to effectively assess student assignments). Diigo also lets you send an email or blog post directly from a Web page, automate a daily blog post of your bookmarks with comments, or create blog or site widgets with your bookmarks. Founded in 2005 by Wade Ren.

Diigo is my personal favorite

12/1/2007

REMINDER: There’s two interesting Genealogy Research groups at Diigo. First, there’s the Genealogy Research Resources group which catalogs data sites like archives and libraries. This group has a significant collection of useful sites. Then there’s the Genealogy Research Support group for links to how-to articles and videos, software vendors and reviews. Anyone can take advantage of these resources and if you’d like to add to the collection, all it takes is a free Diigo account.

Diigo builds on the MyStickies concept and fuses it with a social bookmarking system similar to Del.icio.us. The result is the best web-clipping/collaboration/bookmarking/thought-organizing tool out there. Once you've installed Diigo, you'll get a Diigo tool bar at the top of your browser. Diigo also offers a little javascript link you can drag into your links bar that essentially does the same thing without taking up as much room. Using the Diigo tool bar you can highlight text on a web page, add sticky notes, bookmark and tag a page, and see public comments made by other Diigo users.

But the feature that catapults Diigo into the stratosphere in my mind is its ability to search annotations.  If you do any blogging, I'm sure you know why this is such a helpful tool. Now I can annotate facts and figures on web pages and tag them. In the future, when I desperately need references and links for an article, I have a whole database of searchable stickies and bookmarks. When I return to the web pages I've annotated, there are all my notes and highlights. Also, since all of my Diigo data is out in the cloud, I can access it from any computer.

In preparation for our talk at SXSW and eBook, we’ve been compiling info on our blogging practices and favorite web apps. I have to say, one of the most useful and robust tools we use right now is Diigo. We use Diigo for TrackSuit CEO and for our corporate clients, we also use it for our personal bookmarking. I think our entire team has switched from Del.icio.us to Diigo, and not in a show of solidarity, but out of sheer convenience.

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.

Diigo as a Teaching Tool I’ve recently started using a new social bookmarking service called Diigo to collect and share online resources with my students. (Diigo has features similar to del.icio.us, which I have also used for teaching, but it’s substantially more powerful.) The appealing thing about Diigo is that it allows me not only to create a list of links but also to highlight and annotate webpages. In other words, I can point to and comment on specific sections of a webpage. Diigo works really well for sharing, but I also think that it could be very useful for doing research online, because you can essentially highlight and annotate much as you do on paper. To get a better idea of what Diigo can do, take a look at my annotated collection of links on “Race, Culture, and Politics in the New South,” or access my links collections

The most helpful part of Classroom 2.0 Live in San Francisco this past weekend was the lightning rounds and the product demos.  The ones who did have an hour, including myself, probably would have been better off staying within fifteen minutes.  Here are some products in the order of my personal preference: 1.      Diigo (www.diigo.com) is perhaps the most useful site I’ve seen lately, of course elegant in its simplicity.  It promotes a better version of social bookmarking with features that enable clipping, quoting, and annotating among much else.