Entry 3. Diigo Social Bookmarks (Assignment 2) reflection

The Internet is also referred to as the Web, and what a perfect description that is. When you start researching there are so many links for drilling down to information that you can easily weave from site to site and wind up no where near the page you originally began on. It's very much like a spun spider web, and can seem tangled at times. Sure you can bookmark the sites by using your favorites setting on the browser, but in the IT648 class that I am taking at USM this summer Dr. Yuen introduced us to a free service that goes far beyond just bookmarking. At http://www.diigo.com/ you will find this wonderful tool. Their video intro refers to it as a cloud based personal information management tool, a perfect description.

Diigo has many neat options, the first of which enables you to not just bookmark a page, but it saves the information on their server so you can access it from any computer that you are on, not just locally to your machine. This is referred to as cloud computing, or 'in the cloud', which you may already be familiar with. It is great for people who use different computers for working on, such as those on a lab. You can get to your stored information from any device using all major web browsers, iPad, iPhone, and Android. For Android users there's even a QR code (shown below) for the bar code scanners to make it easier to download onto your device.

In addition to simple bookmarking you can:

• highlight text on the page (using different colors)
• use sticky notes to make notations to yourself
• add tags to your bookmark
• capture, annotate, and mark up screen shots
• download offline data for reading where there is no access to Internet

Have you ever bookmarked a link to a site and find that it's no longer there when you try to go back? You can choose options in Diigo that will save the page for you to go back and read when you are ready to. It will archive an entire web page through snapshot and save it as html as well as image.

Another neat feature is that you can collaborate and share your saved information with other people. I give Diigo a thumbs up! If you want to see it in action watch the video at: ***Diigo Intro***