Clicking through the chaos

With all of the online resources and the abundant information available on the Internet, we have reached overload. Depending on your search, you may end up with hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of results. You then have to filter and sort. Ah! That moment when you find something useful! But now you have used all of your time to find it…you need to reference it later.

Bookmarking online is nothing new; however there have been some serious advances in how it’s organized. Two helpful websites are Diigo and Scoop.it. These sites allow you to not only save and organize links to pages you wish to revisit, but they also allow you to follow and share your bookmarks with others. Although Diigo is referred to as “social bookmarking” and Scoop.it is considered “social media curation,” the overall function of the two is quite comparable.

Diigo allows you to create a library (list) of saved websites. When you add a site you are able to write a description and also add multiple tags to help you easily locate that page or particular topic in the future. Diigo also has a highlighting and notes feature that allows you to easily reference specifics from the site. The “social” aspect of this bookmarking tool comes in when you follow other Diigo users. You can access others’ libraries that you specifically follow under the “My Network” tab as well as browse on the “Community” tab. The “My Groups” tab allows you to collaborate and form lists of sites with other users about a shared topic. Diigo provides organization, collaboration and suggestions.

Scoop.it has similar functions (with different names) but a very different layout. Instead of one main library you create “topics” and “scoop” pages relevant to those topics. It is definitely a much more visual organization, allowing you to see little icons or photos from the site as well as the first few lines on the site, the curator’s (your) insight and others’ comments. Scoop.it also features tags, plus you are able to filter your scoops by keywords. Again you can follow other users and “re-scoop” their scoops to your own topics. There are also extensive lists of suggestions about your topics available to browse. Scoop.it adds visual and personal comments to organization and recommendations.

Both sites have their strengths; Diigo appears better for overall organization and easy access (by looking up tags or using lists) whereas Scoop.it seems to be better for browsing related articles and websites. I prefer the layout and organization of Diigo and think that I will continue to use it to save and organize my online Spanish teaching resources.