Web Business Marketing Blog

With over 150 social bookmarking tools to choose from [1-2}, the selection of Diigo is not obvious. But here’s a number of features that - in combination - make Diigo the tool we would never want to be without:

Highlighting: when browsing, you can highlight sections of a page. And as long as you are logged in to your Diigo account, these highlights are preserved during subsequent page visits, from any computer.

Productivity: the mere fact of highlighting (from the toolbar) already bookmarks the page (in seconds). The toolbar allows you then to add tags.

Comments: in addition to highlights and tags, you can annotate pages with personal comments, which you can choose to keep private or make public.

Groups: you can create groups where members collaborate to share and comment on bookmarks within a theme. Members can be ‘be invitation only’ or you can make groups open for any interested Diigo user.

Lists: a personal thematic collection of bookmarks can be easily organised in a list.

RSS feeds: Diigo produces annotated content streams based on your personal bookmarks, lists or groups.

Email alerts: groups members can receive alerts of new postings to a group, which can also be aggregated on a daily or weekly basis.

Tag management: tag clouds are great, but they come with a few issues that Diigo attempts to address, at least in part:

• Inconsistent tagging (e.g. renewable, renewables, renewable.energy, “renewable energy”): merging tags by simply editing them is straightforward
• popular tags: some tags tend to accumulate 100s of bookmarks over time, making them unusable. Diigo lists ‘related tags’ as a further filter. For example, if you have 100s of tags on ‘renewables’, a specific renewable technology, or country could act as a more specific filter.

Applications for Diigo

Above features make Diigo a great tool for knowledge management. It scales well to 1000s of bookmarks and beyond. It allowed us to define 0.5K tags so far in our group on sustainable energy, with no sign of a limitation in sight. If you need to monitor a rich, broad and relatively slow information stream, Diigo is great for content management and sharing. It even assists in the first stages of new content creation, for example by offering a mechanism to collect research in a custom, annotated list.

You can further use Diigo for personal bookmarking. Librarians use Diigo. And you can find many groups on specialised subjects or hobbies, e.g. genealogy research.

Diigo or other tools

Digg or Diigo? Digg supports buzz marketing, Diigo is for content marketing. Digg is a game of finding that single bookmark that makes it to the frontpage (and often makes a website collapse from the burst in traffic). Diigo is about your personal or group archive of relevant bookmarks, irrespective of their overall popularity.

A comparison with del.icio.us is more appropriate. While the latter is definitely the reference bookmarking tool, Diigo with its toolbar, lists and groups is more versatile and increases your productivity. If you need its specific features, they make all the difference.

Links

1. 115 Social News and Bookmark Sites Ranked and Rated | Social Media Trader
2. Social Bookmarking Sites on Squidoo

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