Once of the first posts I read on this new tool was from Will Richardson, New Reading, New Writing.  (April, 2009) He wrote about Steven Johnson’s essay in the Wall Street Journal “How the E-Book Will Change the Way we Read and Write” (April 2009).  If you follow the link to the essay, and you are a member of Diigo, you will see a considerable amount of highlighting and commenting on different portions of the story.  Just as it was supposed to be!

Fast forward to today, some four months later.  I have been seeing more and more “public commenting” on major pages–facebook, news sites, now my iGoogle page.  These comments are, at least, an annoyance and, at most, spam.  So far as I can tell, you can’t turn off individual comments.  You can filter for private comments (hopefully the ones you left yourself!) or comments left by group members.  Evidently, the Diigo team is trying to deal with this onslaught.  I logged into my iGoogle account this afternoon and saw the following (see image here).

Comment spam is becoming a topic on the Diigo forums.  Diigo has published some guidelines on the issue of public vs. private annotations:

Private vs. Public

• Sticky notes are either PRIVATE (default), PUBLIC, or GROUP. Private sticky notes are viewable by the author and any forwarded recipients.
• Public sticky notes can be seen on the page by all Diigo members with the Diigo toolbar or Diigolet installed, and its viewing mode set to “All“.
• The highlights associated with public sticky notes also become PUBLIC, i.e., viewable to all Diigo members.
• Public highlights and sticky notes should be done with care. To minimize graffiti and spam, we have raised the bar for making public highlights and sticky notes:you need at least two friends in the Diigo community to do so.

There has been at least one blogger posting out of frustration (Krishnan Subraminian, July 2009).

Diigo has added a feature to hide annotations on individual URLs.  To solve my iGoogle page problem (I did not think it very likely that I was going to get any riveting content via stickynotes on this page!), I clicked on the Diigo options menu and proceeded to the “bookmark and highlight” tab.  Here, you have the option of creating your own blacklist with “hide public annotations on selected pages”.  I believe this will be an adequate fix for me.  I expect spammers are going to limit their attention to major first level pages.

As part of the exploration and documentation process, each student posted a discussion topic in a social bookmarking forum on our Moodle course. They gave a run down of the major features and linked to the site. Then, as they gave their presentation, we all logged in and started a reply. We took notes, added questions, mentioned the things we liked, or the things we disliked as the presentation proceeded. It was rather like organized back-channeling.

The idea is that each student will be able to use our shared document from google docs, the original post, and the notes provided by every other member of the class to create a blog post reviewing this particular bookmarking service and its potential for professional or K-12 classroom use.

These reviews will be published in our community on eduspaces.net with a tag of “social bookmarking”.

At the end of the class, we voted on the social bookmarking service that we thought would best suit our needs and diigo.com won. Everyone signed up and by Monday we should have all “friended” each other and started sharing bookmarks!