I first tried Diigo in January of 2006. I liked the idea, but not the execution. My interest was spurred again by their presence at the 2006 Emerging Technology conference, but the service still didn’t “stick” and was slow and buggy. I tried once in 2007, same thing. So here we are again, and Diigo is the now the hot new thing among some edubloggers.
I’m trying it a bit (the toolbar and the Diigo site have greatly improved) but for the most part it addresses needs I just don’t have. The idea of archiving pages that I bookmark has always been more interesting than the reality… most of the time I want access to a site to share with others, not as a research tool (I have, and am quite happy with, Zotero for in-browser research needs). Page annotations are really only interesting to me as part of some kind of focused group effort. Annotations from the web at large aren’t compelling (their value is decidedly less than the link to the site) and I don’t foresee any group I am working with taking to Diigo in a methodical, purposeful way… though I could envision that being a very powerful ise. In some ways Diigo feels like a more sophisticated, but less charming and fun, version of StumbleUpon.
While I’m not as radical as D’Arcy, I share in his belief that most of the power of the network is in the people, so for social bookmarking del.icio.us still feels like the place for me to be. And that is where the groundswell of Diigo enthusiasm might be most fruitful: as a prod to get the very slowly evolving del.icio.us service to develop a bit more quickly in response to a perceived threat. It would be nice to see some of the features that we’ve heard noises about for years see the light of day!
Chris,
Diigo has many things to offer beyond what is available from other social bookmarking sites.
But I just want to emphasize one point: Lots of people use diigo simply because they want to highlight paragraphs of interests as they read, or write comments on the page, just like reading a book. Having said that, I suppose it is also true that some people do not ever use highlighter even if they are reading their texbooks …..
The interesting thing is that I am an unreformed marker-upper of books and constantly telling others to do the same. But with the web? I just don’t see the point nearly as often. And if I did so, like marking up books, it wouldn’t really be a social act, but one of research and I have Zotero, which does even more than Diigo in that area, for that.
I realize that Diigo has features that go well beyond other bookmarking sites… thus I made a special effort to say that I could see how it could be useful to people in certain situations, with defined groups, etc. I’m seeing much less utility in the ad-hoc conglomerations that are the web.
But we’ll see. It’s not like I haven’t been wrong before.
Not sure I get the value of “highlighting” a web page… I highlighted textbooks until the marker ran dry back in my undergrad days. Then discarded the book after the final exam. Completely different purpose - that was highlighting to aid in memorization.
Now, if I want to remember something, primarily it is by storing a link to it. To do that, I just chuck it into del.icio.us with some tags and a description. If I really want to remember it, in full context, I write a blog post.
But, is it really “radical” to say that I don’t care one iota about the exact tools that I use, only that they let me connect to the people I care about - my Network? Tools change. They come and go. They evolve. But the people are the one constant (well, ok, people come and go, too, but you get the point
)
It’d be radical if it were true not a useful act of hyperbole
For instance, if you didn’t care one iota about tools you wouldn’t be using the internet or a browser or this blog engine or that one or this tool or that would you? By definition you couldn’t care about networks being down, tools changing to not work in a way you expected or going away, etc… I do think you put primacy on the people in the network and that the way you care about tools is not in some abstract way or some hunt for all the latest features, but for the ones that best let you connect to those people. Which is a good way to go, I think, and certainly putting people first.
But not caring “one iota?” Methinks D’Arcy doth protest too much
That being said, I am still less radical because not everything I do with network tools is for the network– some of it is for me personally, some of it even unshared– and at that point the way things work (features, interface, etc) take on even more importance. Del.icio.us is the people that use it, so I stick with it despite it being less featureful and slow to change. But some other tools where I make many fewer social connections are subject to change based on features and capabilities….
yeah, ok. there’s a small iota. If my blog blew up, I’d probably freak out. If Twitter went down (for longer than seems regular) I’d feel a bit disconnected.
My point is that I don’t care about the _exact_ tools. You must be like water, my friend. You must flow. And crash. Or something like that…
Amen!
Highlighting web pages can be even more useful than highlighting books
1. You can search your highlights — bring you to that key piece of inf you found more easily.
2. You can send highlighted and sticky-noted web pages to colleagues, pointing to specific points and saving them time
3. With highlights, your bookmarks are no longer just links. With highlights and notes extracted and aggregated, they are research notebooks
4. better group collaboration …
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