My first experiences with Diigo were not promising. I found it a barren, rocky land where my bookmarks could find no purchase. The layouts were poor, the instructions confusing, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to bookmark anything. I considered rending my clothes and despairing in dust and ashes. Then Caroline helpfully pointed out that I was actually on the site www.digg.com rather than Diigo. Once again my selective dyslexia betrayed me. After I actually found the correct site I began to see what the fuss was all about. And now you can see my super-fabulous museum of awesomeness on these here internets at the following site: http://www.diigo.com/user/psychodawg2000.
So now that I actually have a Diigo site and a chance to play around a bit I'll give my thoughts and the implications. First, i really like the site. I had been using google bookmarks as my primary online bookmarking site and while it was fine, it really couldn't touch the features and interactivity of diigo. The best feature for me is the ability to search for common tags or to browse the bookmarks of people who have saved common websites. This is critical because a lot of the websites I use for work are a bit, shall we say, esoteric. Websites on statistical analysis, databases of ed research, etc. As these are often hosted on university websites or otherwise obscure they often elude the Boolean engines of google and other search platforms. Being able to actually work through the bookmarks of people with similar interests and careers was immeasurably helpful. Within about 15 minutes of browsing I had bookmarked 5 new websites on stats that I had not been aware of. Very cool.
In a way, Diigo seems to operate like one of the classic research tricks anyone in the sciences is taught in grad school. Namely, if you are interested in a subject area, find a recent journal article. Work backwards through the references, find those articles, and then work through their references. Within a few hours you can pretty much have the entire corpus of that particular research field. Perhaps more interestingly, the Diigo model pretty accurately reflects the working of the brain's neural associational networks and the general model of memory. One memory datum (think tag) and it is associated with other bits of memory (think other users with the same tags and then the users who share their tags) and in the end those networks of associations are what create memory and consciousness. It's no wonder some philosophers are actively considering the question of whether the Internet itself could ever achieve consciousness.
That high falutin' thinking aside I did find some downsides. While I think Caroline is exactly correct in that having as many tags as possible is the key to making Diigo an effective social bookmarking tool, the sheer volume of how many bookmarks many individuals I visited had makes even multiple tags difficult to operate. When the user has 3,500 bookmarks (as some I visited had) even if they are providing 5-6 tags per bookmark it becomes tedious to slog trough 250 links per tag. I think I'd like to keep mine a bit more streamlined. Some users appear to simply bookmark anything they find remotely interesting. I think this detracts from the ability to communicate effectively the difference between a high quality and low quality link. In a way I guess this comes down to whether you wish Diigo to be a tool for you, or as a platform for social bookmarking. If you prefer the former 3,000 bookmarks is probably inevitable. If the latter, quality is (I think) preferable to quantity. To each their own.
Some things I have yet to have a chance to fully explore. Later today I'm going to upload some (I think) relevant bookmarks to our 23 things group and I'd like to find some like minded groups to join. I also have yet to find a use for the annotations feature (although this is probably a function of my staggering laziness rather than the utility of the annotations feature itself). I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised by Diigo. I imagine this will be a major tool I use for as long as we are all around. Which according to the Mayan Calendar is three more years. Maseltov!
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I, too, find it problematic to search diigo pages with thousands of bookmarks, no matter how many tags they have. But I do agree with Caroline, that the more tags the better. I look at it as a reverse index. When you create a tag, you create an entry into an index, just like in a book. When you look up something in the index of a book, you get multiple pages where that word was found. This is how I had to wrap my head around tags, because, believe me, I had it all wrong in the beginning.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI love the way you compare using Diigo to classic research techniques. I had never thought about it that way, but it's the truth. I can't tell you the number of times that I have gotten sidetracked by that backwards searching, however it typically has led me to some great finds that I wouldn't have come across on my own.
Jessica has a great point about adding to the "index". I love that analogy!