Monday, May 24, 2010

Social Bookmarking - Diigo

One of the best ways for writers and researchers to make public their investigation of things is to use social bookmarking. There are several services for this. For researching, I prefer Diigo (which I first learned about a couple years ago when I saw it in action on Michael Wesch's viral video). Diigo allows one to

  • keep bookmarks in the cloud
  • tag bookmarks (so you and others can find them easier)
  • annotate bookmarks (add comments for oneself or others)
  • make bookmark lists (private or public, good for research purposes)
  • join or create bookmark groups
  • share bookmarks with individuals or groups
  • research bookmarks
  • annotate web pages (or highlight passages)
  • share one's annotated/highlighted versions of web pages
  • send a bookmark (or set of bookmarks) to one's personal blog 
Diigo is also a great way to employ social discovery as part of one's research process. That is to say, one can readily find people who are studying (or at least bookmarking) things within one's interests, subscribe to their content stream, or use their connections to deepen social and content research. Like other social networks, one can friend people within Diigo and begin networking that way.

Here is the link to my public Diigo bookmarks. More specifically, here is a link to my Diigo bookmarks tagged as both "diigo" and "tutorial." There you can find intro videos and a slideshow, plus helpful links to get started with using Diigo.

2 comments:

  1. I didn't know anything about Diigo before I took the ENGL 295 class. Here's what I think about it so far:

    I like being able to highlight and go back to the ge, and I like being able to add personal sticky notes. This consolidates my notes, and it's really helpful.
    I like having a specific place where I can put articles together. It is much easier to remember how I connected them all with the tools that Diigo provides.

    I dislike how much time I spent trying to find a group/other contacts to match my research interests, and the fact that I never really found anything satisfactory. However, it did seem that there was good material out there.
    I dislike the random sticky note on my google search engine that always pops up.

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  2. Diigo=my love! I have betrayed the trust I promised within my literary marriage to JSTOR and have a mistress (or "mister"ress since I'm a good girl swinging "straight" up for my team, if you know what I mean!) now, Diigo! Oh how I love my literary search engine. Best research tool I've found so far. If the sound of emailing yourself article links so as to find them the next attempt at writing, rings true in your ears, convert convert! I have enjoyed every second of its use. While I don't do a ton of searches using the Diigo library, I use it as a storage facility for my articles and OMG I could cry it's so beautiful! The one problem (and really, it's only been one so far) is when you do find a scholarly article on some place like...oh JSTOR (I didn't abandon him completely) you can't highlight or add sticky notes, only bookmark and share it. But the benefits FAR out weigh the cost in my opinion and I now suggest it to all researchers I come across!

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