Diigo.com: “A collaborative research platform”

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.