Journal #13

Journal #13

Diigo.com

In my last technology blog, I looked a delicious.com, and was a bit underwhelmed.  This time I decided to compare Diigo to see if it was any better.

Diigo is a little more complex than delicious.com because it's not just social bookmarking.  This is a helpful infographic the site provides as explanation:

 

https://www.diigo.com/index

It makes me wonder what the next figure will be for 6.0.  Alien? Man in a flying car? No, we'll probably get a new Diigo sooner than flying cars. :)

 

Right off the bat I noticed that Diigo is much nicer looking than Delicious because of graphics like this and others.  I know that looks shouldn't matter and that "it's what's on the inside that counts."  But let's be honest-- kids won't use it if it doesn't look cool.  And part of the purpose of visual media like the web is to be VISUAL.  Diigo wins here.

More importantly, the additional features are apparent from the beginning, and they're fairly easy to use.  As soon as I signed up, I had the option to take the tour, but I declined thinking I could come back to that easily later.  Big mistake!  Now I can't find it, but there is a help section that covers most of what I need, I think.  So that's my fault for trying to multitask too much.

The features that Diigo has that Delicious doesn't are many because I can choose from different versions of Diigo. The recommended version is called Diigolet, and it includes bookmarking, higlighting, sticky notes, and sharing.  These features are just pretty much what they sound like.  You can also go to a very basic version that just includes bookmarking, but why not have some options?  Like Delicious, Diigo also has an app for iphones, but it also has an app for android, which as far as I can tell Delicious does not.

Like delicious, diigo offers the option to follow people and groups.  By searching “library,” I found several users who, by their other tags, seem to be school librarians, so I decided to follow 2 that seemed most relevant.  I found a group called Teacher-Librarians and joined it, as well.  Then I saw that it is run by none other than Joyce Valenza!  I got to choose how often I could receive email updates from the group.  Choices ranged from as often as daily to never at all.  Right now I’m set for weekly updates—we’ll see how useful they are.

You can actually “cross save” to delicious, essentially saving to both delicious and diigo at the same time.  I didn’t try this, but it seems like a nice feature. 

A downside is that there are ads right above the list of bookmarks that closely resemble my bookmarks, so it's easy to confuse the sponsored links with things I actually saved myself.

The bookmarking function is pretty much the same between the two pages.  I personally like the look of my bookmark list a little bit more on diigo than on delicious in terms of color and formatting, but the difference is negligible.  I do think that diigo is slightly easier to use and since it has the additional tools like highlighting it has an edge over delicious.  It’s not a huge difference, and since delicious is more widely known it has a bit of an advantage if you want others to follow you or if you want to follow others who are not on diigo.  Aside from that, though, I prefer diigo.  In the interest of simplicity, I considred closing my delicious account, but I do follow a couple of people who are not on diigo, so for now I will keep both.

The literacy skills that diigo promotes are similar to that of delicious: research, collaboration, source evaluation.  On top of that, the highlighter would be good for taking notes.  I can see that used in an assignment in which students found pieces of information, highlighting the best/most useful parts of a source, and then submitting it via a screen capture software.