Diigo Community

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

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed. I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more

Diigo groups are ideal for team research If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private. Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top. Group sticky notes are great for discussion When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context. Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency. Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this. Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

a lot of thought into the design to make it easy for beginner users to get started while satisfying power users’ needs

things that I have passed on

In my early days of Living in the Clouds, I was using Delicious as my cloud based bookmarking tool. It was my favorite Web 2.0 era tool. I loved it so much that I refused to look at any other social bookmarking apps. When I started blogging here at Cloud Avenue, Zoli recommended us to use another bookmarking site called Diigo for our research purposes. I agreed to use this app very reluctantly and I never looked back since then. Diigo is not just a social bookmarking site but it is also a very good research tool including options to highlight, annotate, comment, share, etc.. This tool has changed the way I do research on the web with its powerful set of features. In fact, I have stopped using Delicious completely. This is much more powerful than Delicious in my quest to organize my information in the clouds.

Pros: Highlight and Annotation. This is a powerful feature for anyone who is using Diigo for research purposes. The best part of this is the finer privacy control for annotation. One can keep it private or share with a group or make it public. Ability to create groups to share with others interested in a particular area or lists to organize information better for yourself. Ability to send to friends who are not members of Diigo through email. Ability to expand/collapse highlights and annotations in your Diigo bookmarks page. Powerful toolbar Ability to extract all the annotation in a particular page. Comes handy while researching on any topic. Here, the network effects can make this feature more powerful.

Cons: Lack of browser button that could hide/unhide the Diigo toolbar similar to Stumbleupon toolbar. This will come handy for those with smaller monitors/netbooks to use the space occupied by the toolbar to see the webpage.

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together.  Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo.  Students can collaborate online to solve the problem.  Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.”  This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web.    Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

hint: configure Kupu to not offer the menu of styles; headings and subheadings are surplus to requirements in these forums

this recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are

A recession means technologists cease to be paid vast amounts to duplicate the work of others

low-cost high-impact physical events we've created (Ignite, hacker meetups, coworking spaces, foo/bar camps) will thrive

A few months back, after checking out the options available, I switched over to using Diigo.  It offers more options, and has some nice grouping features.  Also, I primarily use it because it can send links to delicious every time I make a new bookmark, and would import from delicious when I started, but delicious doesn’t offer the same options.  This way I have a backup of my bookmarks, as well as access to tools that interact with delicious.  This way, too, if I’ ever someplace that blocks one but not the other, I won’t find myself lost in the middle of a lake without a paddle. Like most of the social networking tools, I more or less exclusively use it as a professional resource.  I do the personal posting thing in Twitter to some degree because everybody does, and it’s what makes the community a way of getting to know people, but I’m really there for interacting with other educators.  This blog primarily, but not always, deals with education.  Any nings I belong to are education-related, and of the major social networking sites, the only one I’m on is LinkedIn, a professional resource.  Diigo is the same for me.  It’s all about things tangentially related to education.

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

I’ve been loving Diigo since I ditched Delicious a few months ago. They are constantly adding awesome features and today I stumbled on the groups feature. Basically it allows you to create a group of like-minded users (it can be public or private) to share links, comments and it has a forum baked right in.

This is HUGE… It allows you to create micro communities and adds much greater value to “social” bookmarking. You can be a part of multiple groups - which are often topical in nature. There are all kinds of different options that allow you to discuss bookmarks in comment threads and in a forum. There are RSS feeds for each group - so you don’t even have to join one to get some benefit. And there’s a great “slideshow” feature that will allow you to quickly lopp through the bookmarked sites.

obsessive

organizational

May be using your tags

personal dashboards

reducing the amount of time spent looking for information

spaces where people feel confident about participating

the first great thing about Diigo is that your bookmarks follow you wherever you go.  When you bookmark a site using your Diigo account, you can have access to it at work, home, the computer lab or library.  The other great thing is that once you bookmark it, you can share your book mark links with students and colleagues and they can all have access to your sites.   

The next big plus to Diigo is that you get to “tag” the sites you want to bookmark.  A tag is the classification system you determine so you can organize your bookmarks and find the link the next time you need it; this is known as a folksonomy. 

On the sticky note the teacher could ask questions and Diigo allows people to comment and reply to the questions on the sticky note.  Students could also add sticky notes for other students to comment on as well.  Another way to use the highlighting tool is that students could go through an article and highlight all of the vocabulary that they didn’t know and learn what it means prior to reading the article.  Or students could put sticky notes about questions they have when reading the text. 

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.

26) Hopefully you will already have at least one active social bookmarking account established.  Delicious, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, any of these will do. Open accounts on all three of these services.  Make Diigo your primary account for bookmarking. By doing this, you can use a Diigo feature that allows you to bookmark to all three services simultaneously.

And I was really happy to see your mention of diigo. While I still prefer delicious, diigo does allow you to bookmark to all three sites like you mentioned. When I first started doing that it was more for bookmark insurance - if one site disappeared my bookmarks would still exist somewhere else. Only later did I think of the social aspect of it.

Thank you. I'm glad to see more people using Diigo. It's really such an under valued tool. It has so many social aspects and features, that people tend to get intimidated and never use it to it's full potential.