I thought it was time I jotted down some thoughts about using social bookmarking. I’ve been using it for a while and bigging it up in Netskills workshops so a personal audit is in order. I’m using Diigo.
Why Diigo?
Practical reasons – we were using it on the TELIC MSc course last year quite intensively. I was using Delicious at the time. Delicious is a great bookmarking service (with an uncertain future?) but it seemed daft to be running the 2 together. I migrated my bookmarks over, a process that was quite easy.
What’s so great about Diigo?
Beyond the standard benefits of using any social bookmarking site (online, tagging, shareable) I really like the annotation tools you get in Diigo. You can highlight text, add comments or sticky notes and for a scribbler like me that’s useful. I use Chrome so the Diigo extension is really useful for this.
I like the group function, too. As part of the course we set up a private group in Diigo so we could share bookmarks on a particular topic and build up a discussion around them. We could see each other’s comments and annotations so in the end we’d created a dynamic group library which complimented the stuff we were doing on other social networks.
Diigo allows you to create lists. Lists can best be described as meta-tags, as way of easily grouping bookmarked sites by topic. Tagging would do the same job but it’s a little neater for sharing stuff.
What have I done with it?
I’ve incorporated Social Bookmarking as an activity in 2 separate workshops; one about using collaborative tools and one about blogging and social networking. It seems to work better in the collaborative tools workshop – attendees have expressed more interest in it in that one and are keen to try it out as part of their teaching. The blogging workshop is more about personal practice and it’s not really been on the radar of the people that have attended.
I’ve created a number of different topic lists to do with things I’m working on at the moment. I’ve tweeted about them. Views are recorded by Diigo and they are pretty low but when it comes to compiling lists of links and articles for workshops and just helping me to find stuff I’ve bookmarked, they’ve been pretty useful. My main lists are:
- Participation – stuff about blogging, social networking, social media policy and the like
- Digital storytelling – hints, tips, case studies and tools as well as a few journal articles and book chapters.
I’ve linked Diigo up with this blog so every Sunday it auto-posts the week’s bookmarks. For a while I saw this as lazy blogging as I didn’t have to put much effort in and “doosh!” out comes a blog post every Sunday. Now, as much as possible, I’m trying to add a wee bit of commentary to each bookmark so each entry becomes a mini blog post. It seems that one or two people are reading them and retweeting so it’s something I’ll continue with for the time being.
Any downsides?
There are no major downsides but a few niggles (about personal practice as well as the technology)
- I’ve not had an opportunity to try out the group function properly yet so it may have some as yet uncovered flaws
- You can’t annotate PDFs with Diigo. This is really frustrating when I’m doing research for my MSc as many journal articles are available as PDFs.
- Bookmarking material that is behind an institutional password (e.g. uni library)makes sharing awkward.
- Diigo won’t do the auto-post function across all blogging platforms. It won’t do Posterous, for example. I’ve asked them about it and they say they will if there’s enough demand.
- Note to self: It’s very easy to create the illusion of being well-read by bookmarking everything but reading nothing.
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