Useful Internet Tools: A Quick Comparison

This past week I have learned how to use both Diigo and Pinterest. For those who are not familiar to either of these, let me give you a quick overview. 

Diigo is essentially an online bookmarking site. It stands for Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff. Traditionally one would save a bookmark in your browser. It's helpfulness was limited because it would be saved to a specific browser on a specific computer. If you were out of town and didn't have your computer with you, you were out of luck. If your computer suddenly 'died', all would be lost. Using Diigo, the sites you bookmark are saved to your online cloud account and can be accessed at any time of day, from any browser, on any computer. What's more is that you can save websites to be read offline, and also highlight information on the pages, and take notes. 

Diigo is extremely organized in the sense that you can add tag to each bookmark you create; these are then on the side of your homepage allowing you to access the sites that you have bookmarked by category instead of scrolling endlessly for what you need. Last, but certainly not least, you can follow other Diigo users, giving you access to others' bookmarks and notes. If you have something you would like to keep private, you can check a box for that as well. I try to be an organized person but often times my time is limited and I'm not able to bookmark according to categories. With Diigo I can now do that quickly and without very little effort. am happy I have been introduced to this site and plan on using it often. 

The other new tool I have learned how to navigate (sort of) is Pinterest. This site, like Diigo, allows collaboration and the sharing of ideas between others online. It is essentially an online bulletin board where you can create boards of different categories and post items to these boards. The concept of it is simple enough but once I started creating my first board, it was not as easy as I had anticipated. When I created my first board I then went to search for items to pin to it but when I selected the "pin it" option the name of my new bulletin board did not appear. I had to "like" the item, then go back to the list of items I like, and then pin it to the board. After I added the five items that I wanted, I tried to edit the board to move things around and only four of the five items showed up. It took over an hour for all of them to appear. One nice thing about Pinterest though is that once you "pin" or "like" something a window pops up with related material that you may also want to view.. I do enjoy the concept of Pinterest, but I think there needs to be a way to make the site more user friendly or at least easier to navigate. I will continue to try to figure out my way through the site with hopes that I will be able to catch on to it better.