Shokufeh M's Library tagged livebookmarks →  View Popular

Using Zotero makes the act of constructing a bibliography more simple. The user barely has to think. If he or she finds an article on a site that is supported by Zotero, all they have to do is click a button and, boom, it's done. There are other sites where the user has to enter the critical information for the bibliography, click a button, and it will make a bibliography in correct MLA style. Now, Zotero gathers that information, and makes a perfect bibliography that can be exported to a word processor and printed out. It allows the user to write notes about the article which can also be exported. Sometimes, there are even ready-made summaries of the article. I have no idea who writes them but they are also helpful. The only drawback to Zotero is that unless the user exports the information to the computer, it does not get saved.

Diigo is good if you want to save websites of interest, and then access them from any computer. It does not provide the automatic bibliography of Zotero, but the user could simply save his bookmarks, return to the sites, hit the Zotero button and the problem is quickly solved. Diigo also features a highlighting tool that allows the user to select text from the site and write comments. If the user is logged in to Diigo and returns to the site, the highlights and comments remain. It it also somewhat useful if you want to find websites related to a certain topic that you are interested in. However, finding academic type articles or journal entires in a person's bookmarks is rare.

I’ve observed the recent flood of educators switching to Diigo, and I think that’s great. It’s a really good tool with a lot of excellent features. I still use both del.icio.us and Diigo: del.icio.us for saving everything (personal, academic, professional, etc.) and Diigo for saving and annotating educational/academic pages (which are also sent to del.icio.us).

But I also use Zotero for any serious research project, and here’s why: Diigo and Zotero are not designed to do the same things. Diigo is primarily a bookmarking service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize web pages. Zotero is primarily a bibliography service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize sources, whether they are online or not. Certainly, Zotero is full of tools to make that process easier if you’re working with an online source, but you’re not limited to online sources. Also, Zotero and Diigo export their data in significantly different formats, gearing Diigo exports more for transfer between bookmarking services and Zotero exports more for transfer between bibliographic services.

This is what Diigo can be best at, presenting relevant knowledge in a much more filtered and refined way.