I briefly posted about the online social bookmarking Diigo before but thought it was time for me to go into a little more depth and to try and convince others to get involved and join the Diigo community.
I’m going to highlight 8 reasons to use Diigo:
Reason 1: Keeping your bookmarks online
Diigo keeps your bookmarks online so that you can access them from any computer. Your bookmarks are no longer limited to the favourites folder of the Internet browser you are using. For example I use Diigo with Firefox on my macbook at home and with Internet Explorer on my laptop and desktop at school -- all the time my bookmarks are the same as I’m accessing them from their online store. As your bookmarks are online it is also easier to share them -- more about this later.
Reason 2: Ease of use -- toolbars and tags
The best way to use Diigo is via the Diigo toolbar -- which can be installed for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Flock browsers.
Tagging is the future! When you bookmark a site you tag it. You can give a bookmark as many tags as you like. The more you give the easier it will be to find and organize later. For example: the BBC News article ‘Peruvians kept indoors for census‘ I have tagged with: . This means that I think this resource is useful for my IB students when we look at population data and censuses. I will be found later when I search for tags: ib+population+census.
Reason 3: The social side of social bookmarking
Diigo is a social bookmarking service. If you choose -- your bookmarks can be public -- in that anybody can find your Diigo profile (here is mine) and look at what you are bookmarking. I know that this can feel a little ‘big brother’ but why not share the resources you find? You can also set bookmarks as private so only you can see them. Using the toolbar and keyboard shortcuts you can bookmark webpages quicky and easily -- tagging them as you go or adding default tags so that you can sort them out later.
Reason 4: Diigo Groups
This is one of the features I really like -- the ability to set up a group with other people to share and discuss bookmarked resources. Here is an example -- a group I have set up to share resources for the core unit of the new IB Geography syllabus: IB Geography 2009 Patterns and Change. People can join and then when they bookmark a resource they have the option to add it to this group. As the group organizer I have produced a set of tags that can be used so that everybody is contributing with a shared taxonomy making it very easy to organise and find resources.
Reason 5: Annotating webpages
When you bookmark a webpage you can highlight text and images -- when you go back to that webpage via your Diigo toolbar those highlights will still be there. You can also add comments to your highlights. You can so add floating sticky notes to a webpage in a similar way. If you bookmark that page as being public other people can see your highlights -- a great way to show students the useful parts of a news article or online document.
Reason 6: Transferring your existing bookmarks from Delicious
I used to use Delicious as my online social bookmarking service of choice -- so I had built up a huge set of bookmarks with that service. You can import all your Delicious bookmarks in Diigo as you can with any bookmarks/favourites that you have in the browsers on your computer. No excuse to make the move to Diigo!
Reason 7: Keeping a backup on Delicious
Another useful feature -- as you bookmark on Diigo you can have the bookmarks copied onto Delicious. This is a great way to backup all those important resources plus some of you may have Delicious feeding links into widgets, blogs etc.
Reason 8: Other bits and pieces of interest
There is many other excellent features of Diigo. As you would expect tags and groups produce RSS feeds of contents. There is various notification settings for the activity from groups. There are ‘education’ accounts for students -- I’m waiting to get mine sorted and will post about this when I do. You can get up lists -- as a way to organise the order of a set of bookmarks.
I believe that the features of Diigo give it an edge over Delicious as a online social bookmarking service. Sign up, get involved, join some groups, share the resources you find and benefit from thise found by others. If you have any questions -- just post a comment.
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