DIG-ging diigo...

There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about Diigo....ok perhaps I did a little nudging...:) I have to admit, while I am one who is always willing to try something new, I prefer the old standbys...you know the type, the one who ALWAYS orders Thai Curry Chicken when out to eat...For me there really has to be a reason to "jump" to something as a replacement...People ask: why wikispaces....well wikispaces has all the features I need and I have tons of wikis, so why switch? Have you tried eevoo....is it different from Skype? I like my networks and once I have established a network somewhere, it is tough for me to switch. Let's face it...together we are much more powerful learners than we are as individuals. For a long time I have been a huge fan of del.icio.us for social bookmarking even thought I hated my nickname...I developed a huge network and was although I have been looking for a cleaner looking, more user friendly bookmarking site, I have been really reluctant to make changes.

Enter diigo..
The first time it was shared with me...it was shared as a way to share links like twitter...ok that sounded cool, but really not anything I needed. After all I had del.icio.us and twitter when I found a link I just copied and pasted into twitterific and went about doing my thing...But I recently read something, somewhere that diigo had a new improved tool bar and started to read up on the other Diigo features including the ablility for messaging, creating lists of bookmarks, the ability to turn bookmarks into slideshows, tagrolls and linkrolls, a Firefox sidebar, a Facebook application, blog integration .... not even an exhaustive list mind you I decided to give it a whirl....and what a whirl it has been!!!

How to describe diigo?
Diigo is not just a bookmarking tool, it is a bookmarking, sharing, discussing, and learning tool LParisi : posted on twitter..My quick take on Diigo..while I have not spent much time creating links, tags, etc, I see it as much more powerful a network than delicious. and I couldn't agree more.. I have presented del.icio.us at LEAST a dozen times to large audiences. One of the apple trainers for our state grant points folks to my del.icio.us bookmarks DAILY. I have a HUGE network and yet I get perhaps 1-2 links for me on a weekly basis. Yes Del.icio.us is GREAT for housing your own personal bookmarks, and providing a public link for others, but with Diigo you can keep in touch intellectually AND socially. Think of it as facebook or twitter without the distraction...ok the discussion feature adds SOME distraction but it is one of the things I think was missing from Del.icio.us. Diigo makes it easy to share your links and thoughts with friends and what I have found powerful, is that it doesn't take much time to go through and actually engage in conversations about some of the rich links that folks are sharing. Granted we are all just learning but I have had more great resources shared and talked more about great things in the past few days...on my OWN TIME...not as it pops up on twitter for me to catch or miss... although I am just learning, I can't say enough good things about the power of diigo already.

SO where did I start...
I started by downloading the diigo toolbar...and I think that was just about all it took :) The tool bar includes a sidebar, which can open like another bookmarking sidebar...nothing new here. The main diigo bar though has a TON of features
When you click on the diigo you get a drop down and you can use this with any url as you are surfing...to find out more information about it.

You can also use the diigo drop down to easily get to your
dashboard

bookmarks

Lists

Groups

Friends

Find out what is recommended for you
what is hot on the network

In addition you can easily Import your bookmarks from here or change your options for the site






In addition to the diigo drop down the toolbar includes a bookmark button...
THIS button gives you a similar pop up to delicious but with WAY more options

When you click on bookmark this is what you see
The url and title appear...nothing new about that right, but notice you can
1. Click twitter this ...when you save and send, it sends the link and description to your twitter acct (note you must log into twitter to do this)
2. Description...I am finding myself more apt to do this because I am sharing more...
3. Tags you still get the recommended tags...but a LOT less clutter with tags and diigo gives you a 10 tag limit (sorry Vicki time to go on the tag diet:)
4. and this is the part I LOVE you can add this bookmark to a LIST, share with friends (no for: tagging...just type your friends' names and viola) AND share with a group...no approval needed

THIS is what makes it different...
These are all hings I have been LOOKING FOR that Diigo offers and frankly, now that I know actually exist, I don't know that I can live without!

The network
The biggest for me, is being able to know who is a part of my network. Notice it calls them friends on Diigo? The relaunch has detailed user profiles, where you can add all of your profiles from facebook, flickr, blog, delicious, youtube, etc..You have the ability to identify users as friends as well as several search tools to find them and GROUP them...which is a huge when you are like me working with different groups of people that I might want to share out to. I thought it was nice that you can look for people whose bookmarks resemble your own, AND you can message folks even if they are not a part of your network. But THAT'S NOT ALL...you can great groups (public and private) communities where groups of users can combine to leave shared bookmarks. You’ll even find a comment wall on profiles. These features enable both group collaboration and socialization. There hasn't been on time in the past 2 days that I have gone and had less than 10 things shared with me...ok some I already had bookmarked, but some are really, really good...AND they are there when I have TIME to check them, I don't have to interrupt what I am doing because something pops up in twitter and I want to quick open the page and then never get back to it.

OK well there was a network, in delicious, why does this one work better for me?...well in del.icio.us I never knew who was joining my network or how they found me so I couldn't communicate with them directly if I had a question or comment about something they shared. As far as communities...in Del.icio.us we did this by creating a separate delicious account for the community and having folks share links FOR: this account. Yes, it works, but it requires that someone log in using THAT account to approve all links...kind of defeats the purpose. With diigo I can view what has been marked for the group, who marked it, and choose to add to my own account or send to my network...1 person, several, mailing lists...you get the jist
Here is the eduwiki group I am a part of on diigo. Admittedly groups is something they are still working on, but this is one area I think is going to become even more powerful.

Learning the tool
There is SO MUCH to explore on diigo, I knew I would never get to it all, so I started asking questions...in diigo and in twitter and talking to some users in skype and collaboratively, these were some of the things we learned...

Diigo Dashboard / Profiles
When you visit your own diigo page, you land on the dashboard. This to me resembles facebook and as aly so humorously put it ... Watching friends meet friends in diigo - like watching 12 year olds at a spin the bottle party. "Sue and Joe are now friends" Off they go...
Your dashboard is COMPLETELY customizable...so if you don't want to know who is friending who, you get rid of that box and leave more room for who is adding what sites and what they are saying about it. I do like how you can get quick info from the dashboard like who wants to connect with you, messages that are left, and bookmarks that are new. The public version of the dashboard is your profile (this is mine:) and again completely customizable down to what the public, vs diigo users, vs your friends will see. Now that I use google notifier for my calendar & gmail, my diigo page could almost replace igoogle as my generic homepage. Hmmm is it helping me to condense :)

Other Diigo Tabs
Across the top frame of Diigo is "MY" stuff..
My dashboard
My bookmarks
My links
My lists
My groups
All things that you set up personally

Above in the blue bar are community things...ways that you can search the community, people, tags, sites for things that are going to match what YOU are interested in (hmm similar to stumbleupon)

Diigo has RSS & Advanced Features
Thanks to Chris Champion who discovered that tags in diigo have RSS feed AND that they are embeddable

chrischampion: Just replace the text after the last / and you'll have an (embeddable?) RSS feed for any tag. about or more specifically: http://www.diigo.com/rss/tag/web2.0 (that's the actual RSS file) Or not. Hey, did you know that every TAG in Diigo has an RSS feed? http://www.diigo.com/tag/web2.0

Can I mass remove a tag from all my links?
Michelle asked
Yes, you can...click on my tags tab>then edit >and click on the individual tag to either edit it or delete it. I discovered this because ALL of my tags including the for:jgate513 came in to diigo. I wanted to remove some of the tags that I don't use and condense tags which I found difficult to do in delicious. In diigo, tags are alphabetized so you see them ALL neatly organize. This is different from delicious because in delicious you cant see it while you are editing it so if you have blog, blogs, and blogging, in diigo you can see all 3 and change them so they merge together. Whereas delicious shows a bunch of different ideas for tagging in groups...diigo shows one group of recommended tags, the one you have used before...will appear GREEN when you are tagging them

Michelle also discovered the cool webslide view of any list you create...
http://slides.diigo.com/list/khokanson/shakespeare

A FEW MORE FAVORITES

• Post to delicious: Go to Options: Bookmark & Highlight: Bookmark elsewhere and click on set up. This will open a new window where you can click elsewhere and set up your delicious account. Once you set this up, not only can you simulpost to diigo and delicious, but if tag the site with the for:delicioususer it will go into that user's links for you in delicious. OK so I don't have to abandon my del.icio.us followers just cause something new works for me...
  

FROM THIS SAME LOCATION IN OPTIONS...you can also:

• set up to post to your blog... diigo allows you to add your blog information and set up a "job" to ost daily links to your blog-while this CAN be done in delicious, there was all kind of urls and codes you needed to figure out (which I never could). When I put my blog info into diigo, it did it FOR me. I set it up to daily post, but you can set it to publish direct OR as a draft I am going to have it do this...then cut and paste once a week all my links into 1 post.
  
• IMPORT / EXPORT links from other online sites and from your browser...the links come in with all comments and tags which was pretty cool
  
• Send to twitter: while you are posting your link to your diigo account you send to your twitter network.

----THIS JUST IN: adding to post...for my own archive...I didn't realize that you don't have to FRIEND everyone in diigo, you can add people to a watchlist....might be a good way to manage your network if you are just starting-----

WE DISCOVERED SOME QUIRKS
Lucy Gray had some problems getting what she posted in diigo to actually show up in del.icious but contacted tech support and they put in
and Kate expressed some concerns that delicious links didn't initially import--stating server errors
I think these are all things that are result of a beta program, but from what folks say their support is quick and professional.

SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
Ken asked some great questions throughout the day in twitter as he thought about the idea of adopting a new tool...

Is diigo the amazon.com approach to bookmarks? will reviews stop you from checking it out on your own? That could be dangerous.....
just thinking about this could it actually hurt research for some, too much group thinks perhaps? ....
add a skype piece 2 Diigo and I am 100% on board.....
Worried this makes "skimmers" vs. scholars easier. Suppose thats always been there too.

Jimbo asked
Can you bundle your Diigo tags?
Hmmm that is a good one, but I like being able to create "lists" of things for classes...better than bundles for now.

TO SUM IT UP...
Liz Davis wrote about diigo as well and created a great Getting to know Diigo screencast with Jing

Do you wanna know where I got all the links to their "stuff" ...why from their diigo profiles of course...no more hunting to link....Could it GET any better?

If still aren't YET convinced that Diigo is the way to go, check out the new YouTube video http://tinyurl.com/2h3ger

BY THE WAY Yesterday Maggie Tsai from Diigo was online at Classroom2.0 ... cclassroom2dot0 » LIVE Conversations (which I learned btw from twitter via www.diigo.com) if you go to this page http://www.classroom20wiki.com/LIVE+Conversations#diigo and click on Playback link you will see the recording from this session.

Please take some time to explore, ask questions, check out some great resources, join some groups and start learning together. Would love to hear your thoughts about diigo and please share your great sites with me.

Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, delicious, networking, web2.0, tools

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