Tagging and social bookmarking with Del.icio.us very similar to each
Once again I was surprised and impressed by the reach of these seemingly simple ideas such as social bookmarking. My initial thought was that social website bookmarking was useless or at less unnecessary. But I was wrong. This is a sharing club if you will. Remember Napster? The power of Napster and later LimeWire and other files sharing internet software was in the numbers… millions of people collaborating and sharing files (music, pictures, movies, programs etc) directly from computer to computer or “peer to peer”. Well, Delicious.com and Diigo.com are similar ideas but instead of sharing files you share your searched product, your invested time, the information that you have found, in the form of a website, as a result of your activity on the internet. And the power once again is in the numbers. Like Wikipedia, if someone is wrong about something, it doesn’t matter because a thousand other people most likely will be right and you are guaranteed to get the best product anyway.
I wish Google had something similar. I always prefer a well know company (a brand name product). For example, it turns out Furl doesn’t exist anymore… when you click on the Furl link (www.furl.net) you are immediately taken to www.Diigo.com. I suppose they change the name from Furl to Diigo. Also, Magnolia is accepting subscriptions only by invitation so I did not explore it. I did look at Delicious via the APSU account provided for exploration but I did not join in because I already had one created when I was hired as a teacher over a year ago. I tried to look at my old account but for some reason I was unable to sign in.
During my exploration of Delicious I realized how useful it can be for everyone and especially for teachers. It is like a search engine with limited but intentionally and properly selected sources. At the end I decided to join in www.Diigo.com because I this one not only allows you to bookmark websites but also let you save them either as a snapshot or completely. A service similar to Google’s cached websites, but instead you choose when to cache or save the site. Imagine not having to worry about links that don’t work anymore since the links to your saved sites are guaranteed to always work. Of course, if Diigo decides to shut down you will be in trouble. This is why I said before that I wish Google had something similar since Google is on the rise and will probably stay with us for many years to come. It would be better if Diigo allowed to choose to save the websites also in your own hard drive together with the internet or just let you save locally but share globally in a “Peer to Peer” fashion, like Napster or LimeWire. I think the browser; the IE or Google’s Crome or even the OS should include this functionality.
Years ago MS was experimenting with something similar. With Windows 98 you could easily customize your local folder to include background pictures, internet or local links etc to make your folders look and feel like a website. I think MS was thinking about blending in the internet with your computer at home and make the internet browsing and your computer “browsing” look the same. Somehow they did not continue in this direction. Either way, I think I will use Diigo a lot from now on. It installed in my computer as a toolbar. Eventually I will explore Delicious with my Mac where I initially installed it but right now I need to go to sleep.
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