Diigo v3 – social bookmarking 2.0?

Recently I have been preparing for a workshop on “Exploring social bookmarking” which forms part of the University of Bath e-learning summer seminar series.

Having personally used del.icio.us for a number of years now, I decided it might be an appropriate time to consider how it compared to other tools. As well as re-visiting Furl, and considering some more academic-orientated tools such as Cite-U-Like and Connotea, I looked at Diigo. The more I have explored this tool the more impressive it seems. Diigo v3 was released in March 2008 and has been attracting quite a bit of attention, as Stephen Downes has noted. It is billed as a “social information network” (as opposed to a social network), characterised by its focus on social networking through knowledge-sharing. “People come to a SIN not mainly to socialize, but because it provides superior tools for collecting, annotating, organizing and discovering information.” About Diigo ). That’s not to say that many won’t be collecting, anotating, organizing or discovering information about Britney Spears! However it offers considerable potential in the academic context.

Features that help set it apart from other social bookmarking sites include:

• the ability to annotate text using Sticky Notes. These can be shared with a group or more widely so that for example students could collect their reflections on a particular web resource.

• the group functionality which makes it much more social – for example being able to create groups, tag sites for them and have discussions using the group forums.

• the webslide feature which converts bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshow format, so a group could potentially create a web presentation incorporating annotated pages.

The additional social functionality really stands out when compared to other social bookmarking tools, but on a personal level, if you don’t quite feel ready to give up on del.icio.us just yet you can use the “Save elsewhere” function which allows you to simultaneously save your bookmarks in Diigo and other services.