Part III of this series of posts is about , a great social bookmarking tool that I can’t imagine living without. At it’s core Diigo is a great place to store and manage your bookmarks, but it goes well beyond that without adding so much complexity that you feel like the simple task of bookmarking a site becomes too hard.
Chances are you currently store your bookmarks in one of two locations – either online, using a service like Delicious, or in your browser. If you’re storing them in your browser then the number one benefit of Diigo will be having your bookmarks online and accessable anywhere (meaning no more frustration of not being able to find a site you bookmarked on your work computer while you’re at home, or vice versa).
Next, storing your bookmarks online allows you to share them with others (if you choose to make them public). For example, if you wanted to see a few sites that I found interesting on the topic of “marketing”, you could visit . From there you can go on to search for the most popular sites tagged with “marketing”, or if you have an account you can see all of your friend’s bookmarks that are tagged with “marketing”. It’s a great way to find new sites on any topic.
If you already understand the benefits of storing your bookmarks online, why would you want Diigo when you have a perfectly good solution such as Delicious? Just do a google search for the phrase and see how many hits you get, and that will give you some idea.
So why is Diigo better than other online services?
Here is a brief list of things you can do with Diigo that go beyond the basics:
- add highlighting and notes to a page that will appear each time you visit that page;
- longer description fields (either write your own, or highlight some text from the page that will act as a good description and when you hit the “bookmark” button the description field will automatically be populated with that text);
- link up with friends and share and discuss bookmarked pages;
- create lists of bookmarks to share with people;
- create rss feeds of your tags or lists;
- set each bookmark as public or private;
- find other people that have publicly bookmarked the site;
- find people with similar bookmarks to yours to find sites that you might be interested in; and
- create groups and share and discuss bookmarks within the group.
It is the last of these that I like the most. I can, for example, create a (public or private) group for one of my clients and have several members of their team join up. When any of us find an article that we think is worth sharing we can bookmark it using the Diigo toolbar (making it just as easy as using the bookmark button in your browser) and add it to the group together with a note such as “thought this might be of interest to everyone based on our discussions yesterday on ….”, etc. Think about how many different types of groups you might be able to use this for – work groups, project teams, social groups, etc.
Here is a short video made by the Diigo team to give you a feel for the application:
The best way to see if you like it is to set up your own account and import your bookmarks (there is a tool to import from your browser or from sites like Delicious) and have a play. I haven’t found one person yet that has tried it and not fell in love with the application.
Finally, If you do sign up, be sure to add me as a friend so I can share a few interesting bookmarks with you.
You can find .
