Diigo: social bookmarking with annotation

Diigo (via Tim Lauer) is a new social bookmarking/annotating tool.

Diigo is about "Social Annotation", a superset of social bookmarking. We believe that the social annotation service provided by Diigo can really enhance your experience for online browsing and interactions, and for information gathering and sharing.

As Tim Lauer says, diigo looks like del.icio.us except that it provides better capabilities of annotating bookmarks. This would be good for students as they do online reading and research.

Homeportals: a new extensible homepage

HomePortals (via TechCrunch) is a new personalized extensible homepage. TechCrunch has this to say:

HomePortals is really unique in that every module is customizable, and can interface with other web services. So you can create a new module (and allows others to copy it), and/or modify attributes of an existing one.

For instance, there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality in the other services I’ve reviewed.

HomePortals also has a very nice blogging tool module (see it in action on the HomePortals blog). Now this is getting interesting: I can see using the blogging tool, and adding in my flickr pictures and del.icio.us bookmarks to give visitors a really in depth overview of who I am and what’s going on in my life. It’s like SuprGlu, but the blogging tool is built in, not pulled in.

Students reading and RSS

A few posts below, I mentioned Netvibes, a personalized web page service that allows for RSS feeds. Actually, Google and Yahoo have the same service, although Hinchcliffe said Netvibes was much better than those and other existing ones. One advantage of Netvibes is its integration with Writely.com, an online collaborative word processor. Students working together on the same paper could do so at writely.com, and whenever someone updated it, they would receive notification at their netvibes site. Netvibes already have modules ready to receive feeds from Gmail, Flickr, the weather, a variety of blogs, bookmarks, and those of one's own making. And there's a module for notes. All in all, it's an easy-to-use web resource that can promote students reading, analyzing, and synthesizing (and thus writing) skills.

Flock: a new web browser

Flock is a new web browser that is a branch off Firefox. It has built-in tools for blogging, rss feeds, social bookmarks, Flickr, and so on.

Digg: social bookmarking, RSS, blog and more

A new software tool Digg combines elements of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. From their site (via Ulises Umejias):

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

This seems to combine all the software tools into one. But what's different is that the users decide which articles are the best.

Social bookmarking comparison

At ConsultantCommons.org (via Kairosnews via Depraved Librarian), there is an excellent comparison made of social bookmarking software tools and their functionality.

Social bookmarking and safe blogging

In today's posting, Will Richardson mentions that Rob Slater is developing a social bookmarking program for teachers called scuttledu and wants test drivers.

In yesterday's postings (Edu Blog Hosting), Will listed some possibilities for those wanting to begin blogging in their classrooms in safe ways, including features "that offer the teacher preapproval of student posts/comment moderation capabilities."

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

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