I came across an interesting website called Diigo.com. It is a combination of a social bookmarking site, such as Delicious.com, and a note taking, web content storage site, such as Evernote.com.
Diigo allows you to store bookmarks from across the web, tag them with multiple tags, and share these links with others. You can also mark bookmarks as private, in case you do not want to share them, or you can post them to particular groups of users in the social network of Diigo.com.
While Delicious.com is a powerful tool, one thing it lacks is a true social component, where users could create interest groups to share links within the group, not simply based on tags. The Evernote desktop application and its companion site Evernote.com are one of the most useful sites for gathering together notes, images, snippets of webpages, and so on. Evernote allows you to collect content in notebooks, and share content on a notebook-by-notebook basis. Notebooks can be shared with individuals or with the world. But there’s no way in Evernote to create groups, join groups, and share with other users who have a common interest.
Where Diigo.com really shines is in its focus on research. As you traverses the web, you can store URLs, save text and files (web pages as well as images and PDFs), and highlight and annotate them. These notes and annotations can be shared with the social network on the Diigo.com site, making it what what the folks at Diigo call “a collaborative research platform.” As opposed to a social network about everything, including games, and so on, like Facebook, the folks at Diigo say their site is a “social information network.” It has been recognized by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) as one of The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning.
There are toolbars available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, a one-button extension available for Chrome, and a bookmark button for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. There is some support for the iPhone, but it seems a bit clunky.
I have created an account on Diigo.com and will try it out.
I don’t expect it to replace Evernote.com or Delicious.com, as it’s in a slightly different market than those products. (By the way, there’s an integration with Delicious.com from Diigo.com, allowing you to post the links you create on Diigo.com to your Delicious.com account.). The lack of an offline tool, such as what Evernote has, means that I would not be able to take notes where wi-fi is not available, but I see a lot of value in Diigo.com, especially for the ease of sharing research materials with other members of a research community.
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