All professionals do research. It’s an integral part of our daily lives. Until recently, attempting to research, collate and then possibly re-use material has been pretty darned difficult. Even with things like searchable tax libraries, there’s still the problem of marshaling resources, especially in team situations, unless you are prepared to pay a significant premium. Enter Diigo.
I’ve been using Diigo for the last couple of months – initially as a replacement for the delicious bookmarking service. Bookmarks allow me to pass on more content with short comments, effectively inviting the reader to read for themselves by clicking on third party links.
Delicious is perfectly all right but even in its most recent incarnation, it hasn’t been substantially improved over the last three years. Diigo provides much the same capability but a whole lot more. Like delicious, Diigo allow me to share bookmarks with others who count me as ‘friends’ or with ‘groups’ but it also allows me to highlight stories and organize them for public or private consumption or with named people.
My ability to not only collate but also distribute content in a flexible manner gives me a much better experience within a single application. It also more useful in a social context. I can for instance tag posts that could be distributed to another blog. This means that if I’m a small practitioner partner or manager working on say tax, M&A and business advice, I can easily organize content that could be useful for a multitude of purposes.
I’m not usually a fan of browser sidebars but ever since I discovered Diigo, I keep its sidebar open. Why? Because I have a private list of logins for all the sites to which I contribute or to which I need access in a private list that I can access with a single click. That’s a huge convenience for me.
Is Diigo perfect? Of course not. Last weekend, its scheduled maintenance lasted a good 8 hours (for me) during which time I could do nothing. But then I see regular upgrades, bug fixes and an active community piling in with suggestions. That all speaks to a service that is going places. It may not have the early mover advantage of delicious, but it is a whole lot better.
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