Diigo is a social bookmarking tool. “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage, and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them” (From Wikipedia – Social Bookmarking). There are several features to social bookmarking that make it a useful tool, and there are several specific features of Diigo that make it particularly useful in education.
Core Features
The main feature of social bookmarking is not very social at all: Bookmarks are saved online instead of on an individual computer. Although there are tools that can synchronize bookmarks across different computers, tools like Diigo provide a central storage location of all of a person’s bookmarks. If you find a great link on your home computer, you don’t have to write it down or email it to yourself to get the link on your work computer. You just have to check you social bookmarking account.
Another feature of social bookmarks is that the number of bookmarks is virtually limitless. This may also be the case with traditional bookmarks within a web browser, but most people quickly run out of room on the screen. Regardless of how many folders you create, your bookmark list quickly consumes your entire page. Social bookmarking takes a different strategy to storing and retrieving bookmarks. Instead of organizing bookmarks by folder structure, social bookmarks are organized by tags.
Tags are one or two word descriptions of the web page you are bookmarking, and each bookmarked page can have multiple tags. For example, if you want to bookmark the PA Department of Education website, you might tag it with “PDE”, “regulation”, “legal”, “state”, or whatever else makes sense to you. Then when you want to find your bookmarks, you can search by the tags. So if you search for “legal”, you will see all of the bookmarks that you tagged with that term. You can also search by multiple tags, so you could search for “legal” and “ODR” to narrow your results further. The result of using tags and removing the limitations of traditional bookmarks mean that you can easily grow the number of bookmarked sites to well over 100, and yet easily find all of your sites. This has an effect of changing the way you think about bookmarks.
The Social Aspect
The social aspect of social bookmarking is that you can now share your bookmarks with other people (you are able to keep bookmarks private if you want). Some of the nice features of Diigo are that you can create groups to share bookmarks. You can control who can view the bookmarks, as well as who can add bookmarks. The other great features of Diigo are that you can highlight web pages and add sticky notes. These notes can be private, shared with a group, or open to everyone that has a Diigo account.
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