Delicious vs Diigo: social bookmarking

I chose Delicious and Diigo as my social bookmarking tools to investigate. My thinking being that as I know zero about this Web 2.0 tool it might be good to compare two similar social bookmarking platforms to help me to focus on understanding how they work, what differs between them and how/if they help individuals and organisations communicate, collaborate and create. 

                         

Our group has been editing a Google document  so we can share which each other our social bookmarking tools we've chosen and to put the collaborative/communicative aspect of Google docs to the test. Emily and Bev had already added their thoughts to the document and it was helpful to see their discussion as I mused over what I thought about social bookmarking. It has definitely helped me get my head around this topic. Also I had also forgotten about the useful chat function on Google docs that allows you to communicate with other editors when they are also viewing the document at the same time as you. I think that is a great instance of collaboration and the necessity of simultaneous communication. 

My questions to consider for this post are - 

• Are Delicious and Diigo exactly the same/if not then which one is better?
• Would I use both tools or just the one?
• Will I be able to effectively be able to tag? 
• Is EndNote a better option for study/professional purposes?
• Can I manage a social bookmarking tool and a RSS reader? Are they the same thing?
• Are social bookmarking tools a good way to communicate, share bookmarks and be exposed to new areas of the web?

So many questions! And in no particular order...

Delicious works well and looks good. Its easy to create an account and you can add a 'button' to the top of your browser that lets you bookmark a site with just one click (you can see from the below screen grab that I've also got a Diigo button in my Chrome browser too).

To add a link is intuitive and Delicious and Diigo have an almost identical way of doing this.

Here is what Delicious looks like when you're creating a bookmark - 

You can see that the box to the right is where you entire the link title, add comments to describe the link/why its useful to you and then the tagging function. To get the hang of tagging there is a handy box to tick 'insert recommended tags' so if you're at a loss to know what tags to use (as I was) this gives you an idea of what to do. 

The my main account page looks like this - 

You can hopefully see that my most recent bookmark is 'How many websites are there?' from Business Insider. My taggs are (too simple but I'm getting the hang of it) 'number of websites' and 'websites' and below the tags is my note on why I've bookmarked this site for reference - 'So many websites now!'. 

I bookmarked this website so I could bring it up here - according to Business Insider there were in March 2012 664 million websites! This is possibly the best, and most simple, reason for having a social bookmarking tool - so that you can wade through the mass amount of websites, bookmark the ones that interest you and then find your way back to them using your social bookmarking tool searching for their title or tags that would be appropriate to the article/website/blog's content.  That is an excellent reason to use a social bookmarking tool.

I choose Diigo because it seems better than Delicious. They are both free. But Diigo offers more things. The best being that you are able to highlight text in webpages, add stickynotes to the page with comments and and make notes and attach images.  

Here is what my main account page looks like (you can upgrade to Diigo premium for $20.00 a year and have an add free site - might be worth it as the adds really irritate me) - 

Here is a screen grab of Diigo of the same article 'How many websites are there?' that I bookmarked in Delicious. You can see that I was able to highlight relevant text for when I go back to the article and 

also that I added a stickynote which will come up every time I view the bookmark. 

And these are quick shortcuts to take - 

Tagging has taken me a while to get used to for some readon (like @ and # for Twitter). I had a look at 

John's taglist to see what kind of tagg collection someone who has had an account for a while looks like. It is pretty amazing to see how varied and how many there can be. I do think that tagging will be something that I get better at - its a creative process! 

Tagging for social media has me thinking about my last learning goal - 

• to gain a deeper understanding of how these tools are shaping how we communicate with one another on a global scale 

if millions of people are tagging millions of webpages can we learn about pattens of information seeking behaviour? How people categorize and navigate their way through the web? I suspect that we could learn a great deal about human interaction, information seeking and a whole host of other behaviours if more research was done into social bookmark tagging.  

Here is an example of it happening already - an article by Margaret Kipp - 'Tagging practices on research oriented bookmarking sites'. 

She talks about Vannevar Bush's associative trails and that tagging is similar - in that it might better represented how users actually work with their documents: by association rather than by 

categorisation. 

Do I need more than one social bookmarking account?

There would be absolutely no point in having a Diigo and a Delicious account. They serve essentially the same function - collecting, organising and accessing information from the web to refer back to at anytime. I choose Diigo. 

Diigo has a more intuitive way for navigating around its site - the my library, my network, my groups and community being the main tables at the top of the web page make getting to what you want easy. As Emily noted in our Google document that none of her friends are members - and neither are mine but Diigo let me see all my email addresses from my Gmail account and then let me select who I thought would like this tool to invite (as with Dropbox). Hopefully some of them take Diigo on and we can start sharing links on movies, music art...etc.

EndNote vs Diigo - 

I think that here is an instance where I would have both. I feel that EndNote is better suited to academic study/work and I don't think that Diigo would be as good as EndNote in creating collections of journal articles, books, theses, conference papers etc for an essay or research assignment. EndNote is visually much more paired back and is purely for function. 

Diigo would be good too for school work/professional work. Bev has said that her work uses Diigo to share relevant information. So it works too in a professional context. EndNote just feels more secure and academic to me. But I am also mindful of the fact that when there is a version upgrade people have lost their whole library. 

Social bookmarking vs. RSS readers

Emily made the observation that the wasn't sure if she'd keep both the RSS reader Feedly and Delicious simultaneously with a preference for Delicious because it wasn't focused on keeping up with content but allows you to 'save and share the different things you like on the web'. I think that this is a really relevant point. I'm not sure I'd be able to dedicate the time I assume that maintaining Diigo and Feedly each require for them to be a benefit to me. Maybe that is because I am brand new at both and haven't put the initial time into each one to make it easy to add to little by little. One thing I just found out was that I can (of course!!!!) add my Diigo account to Feedly as a RSS feed - 

This is a bit of a revelation to me and because the two tools are now linked I might be more inclined to use both. 

Collaborative and communicative aspect of social bookmarking - 

For me it is the ability to see other what other people have tagged using social bookmarking tools, join groups etc, that brings it further towards being a tool of total communication, collaboration and creativity. More so that RSS readers/feeds.

Because the button is on my browser I don't see how I couldn't keep using it - its there and its immediate. Diigo offers me the ability to explore the web knowing that I can keep what's of interest to me and to share it with others. 

I will most certainly be using Diigo long after I finish Document Management 1.

Thanks for reading.

Ellen