Diigo Community

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. 

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?

I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see. Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

Diigo: Group Exploration of the Web

Like Del.icio.us, Diigo lets you bookmark and tag pages and store those bookmarks on the Web. And as with Ma.gnolia, you can set up groups of like-minded Web wanderers who share bookmarks. But Diigo, which is free, adds some nifty new features, including the ability to add sticky notes to a page, highlight passages of text, or blog your clippings and notes with just a couple of clicks.

Beta Watch

Diigo. Takes social bookmarking / social annotation to a whole new level. It’s been written up in Techcrunch and CNet. No point in repeating the good news. How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. CNet One thing about Diigo. One gesture to Diigo can simultaneously update all your other bookmarking sites. That may create a lot of duplication, or it may create the opportunity to connect with others across a world of tagging that remains fragmented. I shall continue experimenting with it.

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.

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.

By CNET staff (October 20, 2006) It's easy to suffer from information overload when the world's data is at your fingertips. What you need are tools that help you home in on the most relevant facts and organize them. We've rounded up (in random order) some great services that help you go straight to expert sources and keep track of your research. These digital tools can keep you on track--whether you're working on a middle-school science fair, wrapping up a graduate degree, or pursuing a hobby.

4. Diigo beta How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo's Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won't have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places.

2. Wikipedia You might shun this online, open-source encyclopedia if you've ever been burned by prank entries or fudged facts. But because anyone can edit Wikipedia, it's a richer resource than Britannica for subjects off the beaten path, such as the > 1960s underground press > or > rivethead subculture > . Though it's not the only source you should reference in term papers, at least Wikipedia gets you started. >

The Good: The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers. Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation. The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad: A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion: Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.

Facebook version of Diigo is coming soon, too. That should be very interesting.

Hint: use the same username and password you use for everything else (except your bank account). First, create a bookmark folder labeled HS Accounts in your bookmarks toolbar on Firefox: Firefox > Bookmarks > Bookmark this page > Click Expand Triangle (Right of "Create In") Bookmarks Toolbar > New Folder > Web 2.0 > Add   Here we go. A Baker's Dozen Bookmarks:

Join the KIS 1:1 laptop Diigo group so we can play with the million life-sa ving ways you can use this for yourself or your classes.  Install the Firefox Diigo toolbar. Restart Firefox. Click "install" On Diigo Toolbar, click dropdown triangle > SHOW ANNOTATIONS > GROUPS > 1:1 Laptop See anything different?  Hover over it

Click "install" On Diigo Toolbar, click dropdown triangle > SHOW ANNOTATIONS > GROUPS > 1:1 Laptop See anything different?  Hover over it

Here’s how to set up Related Articles links using Diigo. First, you will need to use a blogging platform that allows you to include RSS feeds within your posts. I use WordPress - the installed version, not the hosted one - and a plugin called inlineRSS.

Each entry includes a friendly name (which you’ll use later in your blog post), a comma, the URL of the feed that you copied from Diigo, another comma and the number of minutes between refreshes. I’ve got mine set to check for new additions to the list every 60 minutes. Now, go to your blog post and enter the following code at the point where you want the feed list to be displayed: That’s it!

Karen has asked me to provide you all with more info on working with Diigo so that those of you who are a bit unsure about what you can do with it can get started. Below I’ve included some of its key features, but I strongly encourage you to visit their help menu, where you can access neat little flash tutorials on how to get started that are far better than anything I can whip up here. Some Diigo Features: Tagging: An easy, user-generated way to categorize and organize your bookmarks Annotation: write sticky notes that can be made public so you can interact and collaborate with others who are reading the same pages. Highlighting: Easy to highlight parts of pages, extract them, and collect them (great for research!) Groups: you can create public and private groups—a great way to organize group projects and add a level of privacy to Diigo that you may feel more comfortable with than making everything public. Privacy: Options for privacy are available on just about all Diigo features Search: You can search not just by tag name, but also titles, notes, highlights, and full text. Blogging Integration: “Blog This” feature allows you to move easily between browsing and blogging. Populate your blog post instantaneously with the highlighted texts you selected while reading a web page - a big time saver. Archiving: Allows you to save EXACT copies of bookmarked pages, which protects you from losing cool stuff that may disappear over time.   Photos: You can collect your favorite photos into albums Subscribe/Post Lists: Bookmark lists can be subscribed on the website and through RSS Community: find new content from specific users or based on tags, hot lists

A noticeable trend at Demo, according to Shipley, will be the move of enterprise class tools to the small-to-medium business class space. The conference will feature six new applications focused on collaboration that can be accessed and used by individuals without requiring the involvement of IT departments. Diigo is going to be previewing upcoming features to its Web collaboration service, which lets you meet online, highlight, clip and annotate Web pages with sticky notes and make slideshows out of the Web pages you visit. "We're adding social components that connect people with knowledge and knowledge to people," Maggie Tsai, vice president of marketing at Diigo, told . RSS feeds and tags can be converted into a Diigo Web slide and the service will let you search for people with similar interests based on their Web site collections. Web slides and online discussion groups can be public, limited to a specific group or totally private based on user preference.