Diigo

I always loved the idea of bookmarking sites, where you can store bookmarks to sites you visit in the cloud, but I never wound up using a service consistently. I tried delicious, but never got used to how it organized your sites, and when it looked like they were going to be sold and shut down, I shifted over to Google Bookmarks. I loved their "list" feature because it was similar to using folders instead of having to tag every link like on delicious. But then, Google shut down their list feature--just turned it off! All my beautifully curated lists were thrown into one big pile with one tag. Needless to say I was frustrated and looked again for another alternative. After surfing, reading, and researching, at the beginning of February I started up on Diigo.

Like delicious, Diigo is a web-based social bookmarking site. So far I think it's the best of the 3 sites I've used! Here are some of the reasons I like it:

• The toolbar is easy to use. If I highlight text on a webpage before I click "Bookmark this page," the highlighted text is automatically saved to the "Description" box. Very handy!
• I can mark everything private, or allow others to see what I've saved.
• I can highlight sentences on the website, and Diigo saves them for me! When I go back and visit a bookmarked site, my highlights are still there. (No more wondering why exactly I thought this site was worth bookmarking!)
• I can also post "sticky notes" on a page, too, with my own comments about it. Kind of like writing in the margins of a book!
• You can email your highlighted, sticky-noted site to a friend, and THEY can see your highlights and notes, too.
• When I go back and look at my bookmarks, the sentences I've highlighted show up in the annotated list...which means I can see the pieces I thought were valuable without clicking through to the site itself.
• Diigo runs on tags, just like delicious and Google, but it also supports a list feature. The cool thing is you can turn your lists into handouts of links, and Diigo does all the formatting for you. 
• I haven't used the social features of Diigo yet, but I could follow other people on Diigo, just like on Twitter, and see what they bookmark. Or I could be part of a group that collects bookmarks together.

The other reason Diigo is working better for me than the other services doesn't have anything to do with them! I noticed when using Google that I had a hard time remembering what tags I used to save a site with. I knew something was there, but couldn't figure out how to get at it easily.

So before I saved a single site on Diigo, I wrote down a starter taxonomy for myself. I tried to think of the ways I remembered sites, and then came up with a brief list of tags to use consistently. For instance, I will remember if something was a slide set, or a pdf, or a video. So now I always tag each site with a format tag. I also tend to remember what type of content it was--like was it a research study, or  blog post, or a news article. So I tag everything that way too. Then I also tag something by what project I'm researching at the time. So I might tag a site with "Storytime Newsletter," or "Spark Activity Cards" or the name of a training class I'm working on. And then last but not least I also tag by subject words.

The other technique I'm using is to bookmark everything I land on while I'm researching. In the past, I would remember visiting a site, but at the time I didn't think it was worth bookmarking, and then I had a hard time finding it again! Now I try to bookmark everything I read most of the way through. Now when something I've read is nagging at me, I can be pretty sure it's in my Diigo list somewhere, and my new combination of tags helps me find it.