Diigo

Thank you to Ana Canino-Fluit and Dianne Aimone for their tutorial on Diigo, a social bookmarking site that allows users to share links, highlight text, and even add sticky notes to Web sites.

Diigo stands for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff." It is a platform for creating online bookmarks, although Diigo prefers to be referred to as a social annotation tool. Diigo enables users to save bookmarks, add highlights and comments to web pages and share them with the public, friends, and user-created groups. Users can edit, organize and tag their bookmarks either at the Diigo website or through the Diigo Toolbar in their web browser. Diigo encourages the creation of third-party applications by making the Diigo API available to developers freely. Diigo is a Web 2.0 technology as Tim O'Reilly defines it. It is a web platform that seeks to benefit the user/creator by harnessing the collective intelligence of the web, as a discovery and discussion tool for web content.

Special Features
- Special Diigo Educator accounts
- Webslides -- turn highlighted and annotated bookmarks into slideshow presentations.
- "Read Later" tab -- Save bookmarks to read later.
- Diigolet -- limited version of the Diigo toolbar, without downloads or installation process.
- Post bookmarks to blogs and Twitter easily.

Strengths
- fast and easy to install and navigate
- has a robust Help section
- easy-to-use toolbar
- share bookmarks easily even with non-Diigo users
- Pro-active and responsive administrators

Weaknesses
- Smaller user base than Delicious
- Importing tags from other applications not instantaneous
- Not yet compatible with .PDF files.
- Sticky Notes may un-anchor if the page they were placed on is later edited.
- Not easy to share bookmarks with just one person (you can easily share with groups or keep private).
- Ad supported (Educator account limit ads to Educational vendors).

Comparison to similar Web 2.0 tools

Delicious

Delicious is the best known social bookmarking tool currently, and therefore offers a larger base of user created tags than Diigo. Delicious is similar to Diigo in that users can organize, store, share, and tag bookmarks on the web that can be accessed from any computer. However, Delicious does not currently have the annotation or highlighting capabilities of Diigo.

Google Bookmarks

Google bookmarks allows users to organize and store bookmarks. Unlike Diigo, Google Bookmarks also recommends bookmarks to users based on their own web history. However, Google Bookmarks do not posses the ability to share bookmarks.

Furl

Like most other bookmarking tools, Furl allows users to save, organize, and share bookmarks. Though it cannot compete with Diigo as an annotation tool, it does allow users to archive webpages by saving a cached copy, in case a page is updated or disappears.

Foxmarks

Foxmarks lets users back up and sync bookmarks from various browsers, which can be accessed online from its website. Foxmarks also lets users choose which bookmarks to synch, such as creating a bookmark list for work separate from personal bookmarks. Foxmarks has limited sharing capabilities, allowing users to create Foxmark widgets for their blog or via RSS feed. Foxmarks does not share Diigo's ability to annotate or highlight webpages.

Clipmarks

Clipmarks is a tool for saving pieces of webpages to store, email, or print. Remarkably, Clipmarks does not allow users to create tags to define their "clips." Instead, clips can be accessed by searching for words found within the text of the clip. Clipsearch users are able to search with Boolean operators and, or, and not to facilitate the search process.

Ma.gnolia

Magnolia was a service that allowed users to store, organize, and share bookmarks in an open source platform. Unfortunately, Magnolia has become disabled within the last few weeks and is in the process of recovering its archive of lost bookmarks. In the meantime, its administrators have advised its users to sign up for Diigo.

References, Articles, etc. Diigo vs. Other Social Bookmarking Tools:

Why Diigo? There are many popular bookmarking tools (the best known is probably Delicious), and as a result Diigo needs to make an argument to the users of why they should use their interface to annotate the web. Their website offers a chart highlighting feature-by-feature comparisons to Delicious and traditional browser bookmarks.
7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better than Delicious The blog, Make Use Of, lays out its argument for what Diigo Beta V3 has to offer in comparison to Delicious.
Make Use Of reader Magnolia created and shared a comparison chart between Delicious, Diigo, Google Bookmarks, and Foxmarks.

Diigo in Education:

Miguel Guhlin at Share More! Wiki has a informative article on how to use Diigo in a educational context: Diigo the Web for Education - From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo.
Teacher feedback with Diigo, jdtravers created this video about ways he uses Diigo in the classroom.
Peggy Steffens Instructional Technology Coordinator and writer of the Best Practices column for the Amphitheater Public School's Tech Talk, encourages educators to use Diigo: Diigo - 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading and Collaboration.