Social Bookmarking

As I was reading "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts..." by Will Richardson, I was immediately taken by his description of Diigo. Ideally I would like to give both Delicious and Diggo a whirl, but at the moment I just don't have the time to play around with both of them. What really struck me about Diigo is the highlight/sticky note function. As I was reading, uses for Diigo in the English classroom just kept popping into my head. The ability to post websites, or links to short stories/poems etc. with highlighted sentences, or extra information added through annotation seemed like an amazing close reading tool for the English classroom.

Unlike the other tools discussed in this class so far, I didn't find Diigo completely user friendly. I was quickly able to add my bookmarks (though only some, as I think transferring all of my stored information over will take quite some time) and found it easy to tag the bookmarks, name them and make them public or private. My next step was ordering them into "lists" which again, was simple.

Where I got lost was in how to use the highlighting/sticky note function. I tried searching the site/playing around on my own for a long time, but eventually I started feeling like that person who refuses to ask for directions when they are lost on a roadtrip. I finally sucumbed and checked the help section for clear instructions.

Once the help section taught me what to do it was so simple that I was kind of embarrassed that I hadn't figured it out on my own. But my problems continued, when I went to test out the highlighting function I actually found it really finicky to use. I am not sure if this is because I use the track pad on my laptop rather than an actual mouse, but I found it extremely difficult to highlight the words I wanted, and when I highlighted the wrong thing found it time consuming to erase.

On the page shown above, I wanted to highlight only the word Dublin, but found it impossible. What you see in the picture is what I kept getting. After a long while of trying to do what I wanted, I gave up (for now), but shall return in the future to conquer the beast. 

Unlike highlighting, the sticky note function was really easy to use and I liked how the notes shrunk down in such a way that they do not deter from the site itself if you don't want them to.

I only played around with Diigo for a few hours, and so far I like what I can do. I am excited to add more of my teacher resources to my account and to search for resources through the social bookmarking site.

However, something that does overwhelm me about Diigo is the amount of information it could potentially bombard you with, should you choose to actively utilize the tagging function. As of right now, I have left my bookmarks private simply because I am not yet ready to swin in the big sea with all of the experienced Diigo fishes. I have mentioned before that I can often find the internet to be an overwhelming place and this is not because of the technological aspect (that part is fine), I simply do not want to read site after site day after day. I have never been an information junkie, so I simply seek out information when I need it. I do see the advantages of having it brought to you, but I suppose I am just not there yet and perhaps never will be. Regardless of making my posts public or private, I am sure that when the time comes to search for information, Diigo will be a useful resource for me.