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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.

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.”

My ability to not only collate but also distribute content in a flexible manner gives me a much better experience within a single application. It also more useful in a social context. I can for instance tag posts that could be distributed to another blog. This means that if I’m a small practitioner partner or manager working on say tax, M&A and business advice, I can easily organize content that could be useful for a multitude of purposes.

I’m not usually a fan of browser sidebars but ever since I discovered Diigo, I keep its sidebar open. Why? Because I have a private list of logins for all the sites to which I contribute or to which I need access in a private list that I can access with a single click. That’s a huge convenience for me.

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 social
Diigo 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. Annotations
The 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 Experience
Aside from all the snazzy features, the core “bookmarks” interface is much better than that of delicious - offering many additional features and better organization.

4. Microblogging
The 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. Discovery
Now, 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 Toolbox
You 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.

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.

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.

For well over a decade, my bookmarks have been machine specific and usually destroyed and lost when I've changed machines. Sure, people have options to save, import, and export bookmarks but I've never wasted my time. My philosophy has been, "If I can't find it again then it wasn't that important."

Silly, I know.

Today, though, there is something compelling about the service Diigo that might change my Internet surfing behavior. Two years ago, Diigo was marketed as a research tool. This year, Diigo is marketed as a social bookmarking tool.

I'm not really into social websites - except FriendFeed. The idea that everything must be shared is total nonsense. I do not share all of my bathroom visits and cannot bring myself to believe sharing my Internet surfing habits are any more valuable than the waste products being flushed down the pipes. Still - I was curious enough about Diigo to activate the account and try out highlighting, commenting, and writing this blog post.

First, I added the Diigo toolbar to firefox. Click, done. Setting up the "Send to Blog" was just as easy. I simply added the URL, name, and password. Diigo did the rest.

I Dig (not Digg) Diigo (not Digg-o)

That would be Diigo. Spelling D-i-i-g-o. Two eyes? Two 'i's"? Whatever. Spell it right and then go get it.

Diigo is one of the few Web 2.0 tools that I find both useful and utterly cool. It actually has value and purpose, because it best represents social bookmarking - which has value and purpose. Lots of it to someone who lives on research -feasts on knowledge and spits out judgments which may be questionable at times (many times) but at least are raising information-soaked questions, not judgments devoid of content.

Classroom idea: set up a “tag” dictionary - it’s one of the options available when you create Diigo groups. Makes for easy evaluation: search a tag and then you’ll see which students have annotated the site.

Concept of tagging vs. concept of list - You can switch list into slideshow presentation of the websites you have chosen from Diigo. The pages are “live,” not just images.

Use the By Tags search option to find users who are adding specific tags to their bookmarks - like Huguenot or Bavaria or Civil War.  Search People gives you many ways to find like minds who may be able to help your research efforts.

Networking.  Without visiting a gas station.  Life is good.

How can you use it effectively in instruction?

As my intermediate students complete the research project we assign, this will be a terrific way for them to match note-taking skills with technology skills. However, it will be vital that we first discuss “copying” versus “note-taking” so that they don’t learn to rely on highlighting as their primary method of taking notes for their paper.

What are other education applications for this tool?

We complete a research report with note-taking project in class so that students are prepared for the research report required in their STEM (Science) Fair project. Every one of our students has to complete this assignment, so they will be able to apply the on-line note-taking skills at home.