*Social Bookmarking*

Around the world (Daft Punk),

Let me preface this post by saying my computer crashed this weekend, which really blows and that means posting is going to be slowed for a while, but oh well, we'll be back up and running in no time.

While exploring the internet and learning about some new internet tools from my writing professor, I discovered two pretty snazzy social bookmarking sites, diigo and delicious. These two sites are similar in the services they provide but differ greatly in other aspects. Both of these bookmarking add-on's work on the mozilla firefox browser. These social bookmarking sites allow a person to bookmark, collect, annotate, and tag articles that they deem interesting and aggregates all of the individuals' bookmarks and allow one user to search through the database of bookmarked, annotated, and tagged articles.

Diigo is an awesome tool that allows for a lot of interesting connectivity within frequent online bloggers and readers. The diigo add-on will be right below your search bar and is it's own tool bar and if you want to bookmark something you use the diigo toolbar. First and foremost, the main thing diigo allows you to do is collect all the articles that you find captivating and stores them in your diigo library. Once you have some bookmarked pages you can share them with your friends, or with a diigo created group (where you and other diigo members form a group and anything you bookmark/tag will be up for everyone in your group to see). This allows for collaboration and the sharing of ideas. Another interesting feature that diigo allows is the highlighting and annotating tools. On the bookmarked pages of yours, you can highlights anything from certain esoteric vocabulary to entire passages that gripped you in one way or another. And the next time you visit that page, your previous highlighted and annotated material will be there. Also, if you post that page in the group, other people can highlight and annotate parts that they thought were interesting and share that with you. Diigo allows users to bookmark, aggregate, and annotate sites that they really like and share them with others. One downside to diigo is that it seems it's used more by academics and it doesn't seem like there is a ton of users on the site to share sites with.

Delicious is a similar website to diigo but has different features. The delicious add-on will be in the bottom right corner of your browser, and when you want to bookmark pages you simply click the delicious logo in the bottom corner. Unlike diigo, delicious does not have a highlighting and annotating tool, and focuses more on tagging and aggregating websites so a person can find similar websites of interests that they have or find websites that are similar to a topic they are researching, etc. Thus the point of delicious is to add a website, add some secondary info and add the very important tags. These tags pretty much identify and establish to the reader what that website is generally about. Delicious is more effective than diigo to me personally because there seems to be more users and sites tagged on delicious than diigo. Because of the availability of more information, websites and tags, it's more practical and useful to me. Delicious is also less scholarly in it's concept, simply tagging and aggregating websites so people can find websites that are similar to discover more about the topics they are interested in.

Using diigo, I didn't find too many sites similar to fist pumps & club drugs but on delicious, I found a butt load of sites that are similar to mine. In fact some of the other blogs that I frequent and are on my blog roll, I actually found and discovered them through using delicious. Some of these websites include DISCODUST and You Can Call Me Pelski. These websites are very similar to mine in that they post almost exclusively electronic music and blog about their opinions of the new tracks, introduce new artists and try and stay hip whilst doing it all.

I definitely recommend getting one or both of these useful add-ons and you find some incredible websites that you probably would've never found on your own if it weren't for the inception of these new social bookmarking networks where they allow the users themselves to create the content of the website and provide the database where the users can search and use.