Social Bookmarking: Delicious Vs Diigo

Always looking for ways to make my life more organised, I became a fan of social bookmarking a year or two ago.

In case you are unfamiliar, social bookmarking is a way of storing, organising and sharing your favourite websites. Instead of having your favourite sites listed in your Internet browser, they are stored online for access by you or others on any computer. Social bookmarking allows you to add descriptions to your saved links and tags (keywords) for ease of organisation.

For quite a while now, I have been using Delicious as my social bookmarking tool. There are a number of social bookmarking services available, although Delicious is credited with coining the term “social bookmarking” and introducing the tag system.

Up until recently, I have been happily using Delicious to store, organise and share my favourite links. With the Internet Explorer Delicious add-on, I found it so simple to store sites as I browsed the net. In addition, searching Delicious for websites often gave me more reliable results than mainstream search engines.

This was until my teacher friend Linda Yollis suggested I try Diigo. As a ex-Delicious user, she made the switch after discovering the impressive features that Diigo offers. After I “took the tour” of Diigo, I made the switch too.

Diigo has all the same features as Delicious in terms of organising, tagging and sharing sites but has additional features that make networking and organising even better. Here is a quick summary of what Diigo has to offer

• Highlighting– you can highlight parts of a site so when you revisit the site you can remember what it was that you were interested in.
• Sticky notes– when you are reading a page you can add sticky notes with your thoughts on the topic. Other Diigo users can also add to this, creating a conversation.
• Annotated links– even if your friends aren’t on Diigo, you can send them a link to a page you’ve saved, complete with highlighting and sticky note annotations.
• Sharing links– you can send your bookmarks to your blog, Facebook or Twitter very easily to increase your sharing audience.
• Searching– on Diigo you don’t have to tag perfectly because when you are searching for sites you can search URLs, full text, titles etc.
• Snapshots– you can create snapshots (thumbnail images) of your bookmarks even if the site is password protected as another way of archiving the information.
• Personal learning network – you can collaborate with others by creating groups to share sites and research with . You can also follow others and receive information on new sites they have bookmarked.

In my opinion, Delicious is a great way to begin social bookmarking however if you’re looking for more features, Diigo is the way to go. The great thing is, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. If you are using Delicious and want to make the switch, you can import all your Delicious bookmarks to Diigo and you can activate the Diigo setting to “Save to Delicious”. This means you can send your new Diigo bookmarks to Delicious automatically. This is good if you aready have people who follow your Delicious account. Enjoy!