Being less del.icio.us with Diigo May 19, 2008
Posted by nspb in : social media , 1 comment so far
I recently moved from one social bookmarking service (delicious) to another (Diigo) and was pleasantly surprised how painless and worthwhile an exercise this was. So here’s some notes on why and how you might want to move too…
Delicious has been around a while now, which means it’s well known and has lots of users. But I find its’ interface basic and at times frustrating, so have been looking for a suitable alternative for a while. Enter Diigo, a service with similar features to delicious, but with an interface that feels like a breath of fresh air. It also has a couple of extra features of real use to me as a Netskills trainer.
Like any self-respecting social bookmarking tool, Diigo offers tagging, RSS feeds for just about everything, public and private posts, a range of widgets and a Firefox extension - but so does delicious, so what’s new?
Groups: Create an invite only group for team working or join a public group of likeminded individuals
Highlighting & annotation: Don’t just bookmark a page, but specific bits of it - and add annotations that can be private, shared to a group, or public.
Ordered Lists: At last, the ability to drag & drop bookmarks for display your in the order you want, not just the date you added them (0r by using some complicated naming & tagging conventions).
Web slides: A built in app for demonstrating sites - simple, but useful to us trainers.
Import/export for IE/Firefox: Create a bookmark file to import back into your browser, or someone else’s.
Feel free to have a look around my Diigo bookmarks and those of some of my colleagues at Netskills.
If I’ve convinced you to give Diigo a try, getting your bookmarks into it from somewhere else is pretty simple. It supports import from delicious and other bookmarking services, as well as from a file.
If you want to edge your bets for a while longer, the Firefox extension lets you post to several bookmarking services simulataneously. That’s what I’m doing, but only until those poor delicious users realise that the grass really is greener over here 
Too much of a good thing? May 15, 2008
Posted by nspb in : slideshare, conferences, JISC , add a commentI recently ran a parallel session at the JISC Users & Innovation programme’s Next Generation Environments conference with my colleague Will Allen.
The session titled Too Much of a Good Thing? Individual & institutional responses to emergent technologies explored the implications of an ever-increasing range of web services that staff and students are using as well as, or even in preference to, the tools provided by their institution.
I started off with a presentation that posed lots of loaded questions designed to provoke an audience reaction (slides embedded at end of this post), such as can and should institutions control the tools individuals use? Are IT services the gatekeepers? How do we cater for the next generation arriving at our institutions with a range of user-owned technologies?
Will then ran a lively discussion session in which groups were tasked with answering questions like these from different perspectives. Despite an early start on the second day of the conference, we had a respectable turnout who certainly had plenty to say on the subject. In fact, they we’re still arguing about the best approaches well into the coffee break after the session.
And it seems interest in this subject wasn’t confined to the conference. I uploaded our slides to Slideshare to make them available to people who attended the session, but we we’re staggered to get over 1000 hits and 160 downloads in less than a week. It certainly helped that Slideshare made it a ‘featured presentation’, but I suspect that was based more on the nice (stock) photos than the content.
So hopefully we’ll have plenty of people to approach when it comes to writing this session up for the conference proceedings and for some other studies we’re about to start.
As to the rest of the conference, it was a very interesting event and it was great to talk to people trying out some really innovative stuff. But that’s another post…
