Diigo may replace del.icio.us for me
August 9, 2006 by admin
Filed under communication, gtd, productivity, tips and tricks, web/tech
I’ve been a huge fan of del.icio.us and I’ve tried and rejected many of the potential replacements for the service. Recently I read about Diigo and I figured I’d give it a try. Turns out I love it very much. 
I use del.icio.us in three primary ways. Straight up personal bookmarks, as a service to power the sidebar links on the blog, and as a kind of personal search engine (I conduct searches there to see what other people have found on a given topic, and I have various types of del.icio.us powered RSS feeds in my feed reader). What I don’t get from del.icio.us, and didn’t miss until now, is the ability to annotate my bookmarks, either privately or publicly. Diigo allows me to save a bookmark and even highlight and comment on multiple parts of the page for future use. I can make my annotations public or private and I can read others’ public annotations.
I know other services have done this in the past, but to my knowledge it’s always been a kind of walled garden. I can use the service, but only really benefit when other people use it too. Plus there weren’t cool extra features like RSS and getting your bookmarks pushed out to the sidebar of your blog. Not easily at least. Anyway, the cool thing about Diigo right now is that it allows me to continue to publish to del.icio.us. I just use the Diigo toolbar to bookmark my stuff and it automatically copies it, tags and all, over to my del.icio.us account. I haven’t explored all the features yet, so I don’t know if it’ll replace my custom RSS queries, or adequately power the sidebar links, but it’s a good start.
Diigo does other cool stuff too, like give you options to search a variety of engines on a given word or phrase you’ve highlighted on a page. I’m not a big fan of toolbars–I prefer bookmarklets–but Diigo’s is pretty useful. Lots of options that make sense and it’s easy to turn options on or off. They even have a bookmarklet if you really don’t like the toolbar approach.
Overall it’s a pretty cool app and great for keeping track of web research. If you do much research on the web and find yourself juggling all your notes, this could be a big help.
I think you can annodate del.icio.us bookmarks, at least I can?
http://del.icio.us/bruce7890
How does this differ from what you get from del.icio.us by default? Perhaps it’s because I use the del.icio.us which offers you an option to annotate a link?
Yeah, that was what i was referring to, although to my knowledge, you can only specific a private or public network (and hence annotations) rather than making this distinction for each individual bookmark
Bruce,
Diigo’s annotation is quite a bit more powerful — it is “in situ”, meaning that you can add permanent highlights and sticky notes, right on the page (which also show up in your bookmark lists)
Also, Diigo’s bookmark search is a lot more advanced that delicious — you search both tag and full-text, plus a whole bunch of permutations. It is saving me a lot of time.
Hi Dan,
Yep, you’re right…
I don’t need all the advanced stuff in Diigo’s offering though…
Thanks for the spot
Thanks for the update. I’ll keep de.licio.us unless there is something compelling enough for me to migrate my bookmarks — that will take time.
People who haven’t used any bookmarking site yet will have to seriously consider using diigo. On the other hand, del.icio.us is pretty stable and you’re sure of feature updates in the feature, that is if you think in the lines of the brand.
Milo, the Diigo guys have even made it simple for you to use both diigo and delicious (and a few other popular bookmarking services) — when you bookmark to diigo, your bookmarks can be automatically tagged and added to these other services.