Mark-up webpages with Diigo
The internet is amazing. In little more than a decade, it’s gone from a geeky oddity to utterly indispensable. Collaboration methods could still use some work, but there’s so much promise.
Have you ever traded a Word document back and forth with someone only to find a round of changes missing? You probably know what I’m talking about. Google has been positioning its Google Docs service to address this with live collaborative updates and other cool stuff.
BRI is a Microsoft Office-based environment and we’re implementing SharePoint to give us more collaboration options. But the thing I need most is more basic.
Web pages as book pages
When it’s time to submit grants, I spend a lot of time searching for webpages and taking notes. The NIH website includes more information than you can probably find. But it’s all over the place – a spaghetti mess of redundant hyperlinks Their available resources are dense, so it’s easy to wonder if you know everything you need to know.
Getting started & what to do
Which is why Diigo is so helpful. Watch the following video and get a very clear picture of why I find this service useful.
- Create a Diigo account.
- Install the toolbar add-on.
- Join the Admin Toolbox group.
That will get you up and running. Beyond that, there are a few basic things to remember. The accompanying figure shows you the three parts of the toolbar that are the most important. Once you get the hang of creating bookmarks and highlighting text, you can share bookmarks across our group.
Thereafter, you can scan the contents of the group for updates to existing items. You can even send annotated links to people who aren’t in your Diigo network. In that case, they cannot add their own highlights or commentary. The best case scenario is one wherein everyone’s a member, in the same group, and sharing.
Over time, a pool of resources accumulates and you have instant, annotated documents at your fingertips.
Click the image to see this at full-size. The yellow area denotes the location where you choose the group you'd like to share the bookmark with. If you've already made annotations, you can click the "Share" box to include those (along with your highlights) in the group's contents.
Once you’ve added a bookmark to your online repository and shared it with a group, here’s an example of what other group members will see when they visit the group’s main page:
Click the image to see it at its full-size.
Some things to keep in mind
- All highlights are public, but annotations are either private or part of the group that’s selected.
- There are still some problems when non-Diigo-members attempt to view highlights from the provided links. This is likely due to incompatibilities among web-browsers.
- This service is completely free.
After using the Delicious service for years, I finally made the switch to Diigo last month. In that time, I’ve had a great time hanging on to thoughts that have been inspired by pages I visit. In the past, insights would strikes me and then quickly disappear. This was because I needed to keep my notes on the page itself. With Diigo, I can do that.