Academic Productivity

Would you like to highlight parts of webpages? I do that all the time with pdfs, so I miss this functionality when I’m online. Sometimes I bookmarked a site, but when returning to it I don’t see the part that interested me. This problem has been solved by diigo.

As you may have observed, here at ap we are fans of social bookmarking and collaboration (we have the delicious bar under each post). Showing what people have bookmarked gives us feedback, and it is Up to now the leading contender in this space was delicious. But after finding Diigo, I cannot understand how delicious lost their competitive advantage so fast. Diigo is a killer app, and it works in many browsers.

Delicious could be very useful to align your thought with collaborators.

From their website:

• Diigo – Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes

  
  

  • Don’t just bookmark! Highlight the web! Add sticky notes too!
  • Access and search your findings from any PC or iphone!
  • Create groups to pool resources for specific projects.
  • You are what you annotate, creating a presence for you in the community.
  • Connect with friends effortlessly and non-intrusively through content.
  • Discover quality resources on any subject or get personalized recommendations.

 

They have Educator Accounts.

In my experience, what makes diigo better?

1. it saves the content of the page you bookmark, not only the link. Magnolia used to do that before they lost all their user’s data
2. You can highlight! Important, as sometimes you don’t remember what was interesting in a page
3. Posts are Private by default
4. There’s a bunch of community features behind it. Example: pop psych
5. you can post to other sites, including delicious (they are an example of openness)

On top of all this, there’s another feature that may well become revolutionary: adding sticky notes to pages, in a way that other people can see it. When using the Diigo toolbar, you can see what other people have highlighted, and also comments (sticky notes) they added. That means that you are no longer limited to leaving comments on blogs, you can do so in any type of page (even static pages). Diigo enables you to drop your comment exactly where it is relevant, not at the end of a long list.

All in all, I’ve never seen an entrance in a monopolized market (social bookmarking) with this strength and resolution. Diigo is very impressive, and my bookmarking tool of choice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Reading, Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.