[photo by b d solis]

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!

This time the presentation had to do with using social network analysis within organizations involved in weather prediction and meteorology (bear with me, the subject area matters). The presenter was using a model studying the ties and connections within social networks bounded by the organizations themselves.

“But,” an audience member protested, “in the real world those networks go all over the place. It’s practically infinite.”

“True, but you have to have some kind of bounds to engage in a research project– or even a project of observation.”

“But that data is useless! It doesn’t take everything into account.”

“If we tried to take everything into account it would be practically endless and we could never develop a system to examine.”

And so on. It was funny, to me, that the person in the audience most likely checks the weather forecast each day and plans accordingly. And what more artificially derived system of research can there be than the weather? The weather forecast doesn’t take into account every butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo… does the questioner thus refuse to even consider the forecast before going out?