In this week's post in the Living in the Cloud series, I am going to talk about bookmarks in the cloud. In my early days of Living in the Clouds, I was using Delicious as my cloud based bookmarking tool. It was my favorite Web 2.0 era tool. I loved it so much that I refused to look at any other social bookmarking apps. When I started blogging here at Cloud Avenue, Zoli recommended us to use another bookmarking site called Diigo for our research purposes. I agreed to use this app very reluctantly and I never looked back since then.
Diigo is not just a social bookmarking site but it is also a very good research tool including options to highlight, annotate, comment, share, etc.. This tool has changed the way I do research on the web with its powerful set of features. In fact, I have stopped using Delicious completely. This is much more powerful than Delicious in my quest to organize my information in the clouds.
Here is a short video about Diigo.
As it is customary in this series, I will list the Pros and Cons about Diigo from my point of view
Pros:
Highlight and Annotation. This is a powerful feature for anyone who is using Diigo for research purposes. The best part of this is the finer privacy control for annotation. One can keep it private or share with a group or make it public.
Ability to create groups to share with others interested in a particular area or lists to organize information better for yourself.
Ability to send to friends who are not members of Diigo through email.
Ability to expand/collapse highlights and annotations in your Diigo bookmarks page.
Powerful toolbar
Ability to extract all the annotation in a particular page. Comes handy while researching on any topic. Here, the network effects can make this feature more powerful.
Cons:
Lack of browser button that could hide/unhide the Diigo toolbar similar to Stumbleupon toolbar. This will come handy for those with smaller monitors/netbooks to use the space occupied by the toolbar to see the webpage. It appears there is a work around. Thanks to Maggie's tip (in the comments section), there is a work around. See option 4 in this link.
Krish,
I'm glad you think the switch was worthwhile.
Let me add another huge benefit: full-text search, since the entire page you bookmark gets cached.
For readers who may hesitate to leave del.icio.us behind, let' just mention that Diigo can import your existing bookmarks, then keep del.icio.us un sync forever, so you never really "leave" it and can switch back anytime. Or you can actively use Diigo as a tool, while your existing del.icio.us friends still see your bookmarks over there.
And yes, the "hide button" could really come handy, I felt the pain last week working on a netbook - they typically have only 600 vertical resolution, and it's a major pain when half your screen is occupied by browser toolbars.
I just tried it once. Maybe the data had not been transferred yet. It works now. I am using the bookmarklet as there is no toolbar for Safari. (And i want to keep my browser clean of extra toolbars anyway).
Krishnan,
Thanks for the writeup on Diigo. Glad that you found it useful and great to have your active participation in our knowledge community!
By the way, we know how precious everyone's desktop space is, so we have made Diigo toolbar fully customizable - see here for more details: http://blog.diigo.com/2008/03/27/tip-of-the-day-how-to-customize-diigo-toolbar/
I just started using Diigo yesterday after importing my bookmarks from Delicious without a problem. Still getting used to it, and I'm itching to highlight. :)
Diigo really does offer quite a lot to someone who wants to store bookmarks online. The ability to highlight is amazing, and if you spend some time poking around on the web site you can find your way into a lot of good information.
One of the biggest benefits for me is the ability to quickly highlight a word, search for a definition of that word, and then paste the definition into a note for that highlight. I find it a great way to improve my reading comprehension.
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