Diigo Community

The most pleasant surprises that I’ve had in this course is Diigo.  I’ve been a Diigo user for some time now, but this class is the first time where the ability to make public annotations to webpages has lived up to its potential.  It’s amazing to me to see discussions emerging in the margins of the articles I’m reading.  Diigo is perhaps the most profitable way that I’ve found to connect to insightful classmates.

The new essentials: Top 10 school supplies for today’s students

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.

Groups part of the name. In addition to having awesome annotation tools, it also has a lot of great ways to share information with others, formal and informal. First you can send bookmarks not just to other Diigo members you’re “friends” with (sort of like the for:username feature in del.icio.us), but also to emails (I use it to send stuff to my spouse who refuses to join a social bookmarking site), and to your existing del.ico.us account. That’s the easy stuff. You can also form more formal groups within Diigo. You can share bookmarks (with your notes) to a group, and it will appear in the groups bookmarks. It doesn’t stop there though. There’s a full discussion forum feature, so you can have a discussion where you invite other individual Diigo members to discuss a bookmark or just ideas for that matter, or you can have a discussion within a Group you belong to. Think of how you could use that with students to facilitate discussions around online reading. It takes the social part of social bookmarking to the next level. Some teachers have even used this feature to form study groups for students.

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers). In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet)

I just stumbled upon diigo, which follows the footsteps of del.icio.us but takes it up a notch. All I was looking, was for a way to highlight content on the web. The web is an incredible source of information, and while doing research, I find myself going back to bookmarked pages to find code snippets or some other info. Besides being able to bookmark a page, I wanted to be able to permanently highlight something on the page. Diigo allows you to do this, and it is available with a Firefox plug-in (I believe they also have an IE plug-in as well). Here is an example of a site I was reading and wanted to highlight something:

Now, whenever I visit that page, the content I highlighted will always be there. But wait, there’s more. You can share add notes as well to your bookmarks, and you can share this information with ‘friends’ under your accounts or automatically post to groups you define. This is a great way to share information, you could have people in your enterprise subscribe to the groups you define and then automatically share everything in a collaborative matter. For instance, you could create a group called “Virtualization” and once you find an interesting article, comment what you need and push it to the subscribed users. This can only make the flow of collaborating information a lot smoother.

Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.

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.”

The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

Conversations are taking place with or without you and this map will help you visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence your business and brand.

Diigo: Collaboration Beyond Bookmarks

Collaboration is one of the tenets of today’s web experience. The desire to share information, opinions and emotions adds tremendously to our online experiences. Social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us have been a great way to discover information on the web. But sharing bookmarks in this fashion has limited the level of collaboration we could get to. Diigo, a site that combines social annotation with bookmarking, enhances collaboration in a few interesting ways. Highlighting the Important Stuff Typically I bookmark a page because there’s something on it that’s important to me. With traditional bookmarking I would have to surf the page to find the nugget I want. Diigo allows you to highlight the sections you want to focus on. Additionally, you can add “inline sticky notes” to highlighted sections in order to capture your thoughts right on the page. Sharing with Others Annotating pages is great for an individual wanting to keep track of important parts of the page. But the real value of Diigo is when you share your bookmarks and annotations with others. Not only can they see the page with your annotations, they can add to it if you choose to let them. And you can annotate theirs. In fact, you can set up groups that allow many people to create real conversations from information found on the web. Sharing Beyond the Page Creating conversations right on the page is great, but it’s nice to send the conversation around the web as well. Diigo lets you easily email links and annotations to people you think would be interested in it. Also, you can create a blog entry from it, or even send it as a tweet in Twitter. This is powerful as you’re able to extend the reach of the conversation and open it up for further collaboration. Diigo is packed full of functionality, and may take a bit to get used to. But if you’re looking to go beyond traditional bookmarking, you’ll want to check it out.

Diigo is one of the best tools a student could ever ask for. It helps a student alot because say for example the student is asked to do a research paper and needs the works cited, if he or she forgets to cite something and wants to go back to see where it was that they got the information from, all the student does is type the sentence and Diigo will automatically find the exact website that it is from. Unlike Google or Yahoo, Diigo takes you straight to the website and highlights the sentenced you have typed. Google and Yahoo give you millions of sites which include the same words, or many times just a few of those words and not in order. It is much harder and time consuming to use those sites to look for something. Diigo facilitates the work of people and it also saves you alot of time, which is a great advantage to students considering the fact that they sometimes have more than one assignment to complete.

Diigo: Use this tool to organize research material just like you would in a book or journal. Diigo lets you add highlights and sticky notes to any website.

As the genealogy community on Facebook develops, we are seeing many ways this platform can support us beyond the obvious socializing and networking features. One Facebook tool we can all use is the Diigo application. If you’re not familiar with Diigo, it’s an online bookmarking system that allows you to bookmark your favorite sites and pages with tags for quick retrieval, highlights to focus on the content you find useful, notes to add to the content and the ability to share with others. I’m just touching the surface of Diigo’s usefulness - as you’ll see in the further reading section below. The Diigo application on Facebook only displays bookmarks - yours and your Diigo friends. You will see the bookmark information including any notes or highlighted text associated with the bookmark by clicking the Expand link. Following any of the bookmark’s links will take you out of Facebook. If you click on one of a bookmark’s tags, it will take you to your bookmarks tagged with that tag at the Diigo site.