Hello Diigo - Goodbye Delicious!

After reviewing for some while the development of delicious.com since it was sold on by Yahoo, the University of Cumbria Careers Service has decided to use diigo.com as its main website for useful links.  Our links will be stored at the specific url http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers.  Here's a quick screenshot to show roughly what it looked like earlier today:

Hold On - What's All This About?

If you're not familiar with the likes of diigo and delicious, they are both social bookmarking sites.  Anyone can sign up for an account and use it to save web references that interest them - although in the case of diigo, you can do much more, e.g, annotate or highlight text within the referenced webpages.  A bit like Google bookmarks, they have the advantage that, unlike IE favourites or similar, you can view them from any computer.  An extra advantage over Google bookmarks is that anyone else can view them  too, if you have allowed public access to your bookmarks.

Because of the vast explosion of careers and job information on the internet, many University Careers Services make use of them to reference the vast amount of online information likely to be relevant to their clients.  For example, the University of Cumbria currently has 2055 web pages bookmarked on diigo - far too many to even consider putting on a "Useful Links" section of a website. Most services use delicious or diigo but there are others, and the University of London have their own dedicated bookmarking site, Careers Tagged

The key trick is that the use of tags means that it is possible to pick out links according to a key theme or area of interest, rather than browsing all of our links to find if there's anything useful to you.  So you get  exactly those weblinks that are relevant to your needs - more or less.  You can see the precise tags below each web reference in the screenshot.

OK, So How Do I Use This Stuff?

If you visit http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers you can pick out the tags that will interest you and search on them in the box at the top (next to Careers Adviser's Public Library).  Or simply type the first few letters of a word you want to search on and diigo will bring up all the possibilities in a dropdown box.  Alternatively just click on any tag beneath a weblink or in the "Top Tags" list and diigo will bring up all the bookmarks bearing that tag.

Then click on the link to bring it up in your browser, or use the 'preview' facility to get a taste of what's on that page.  If you have too many links using one tag, you can narrow things down by selecting another.

You can also retrieve links by modifying the main link to the uoccareers section of diigo in a url web address.  So http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/cv will bring up all the links tagged 'CV' and  http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/internship will bring up all the stuff on internships, etc.

Useful isn't it?

Sites like diigo offer you a vast amount of information at your fingertips and weed out a lot of the chaff you would get by just googling the themes you want.  It's surprising then that most students report that they have not heard of this sort of site, let alone used them, or set up their own accounts.  All we can say is - give it a try!

University of Cumbria students can find a more detailed guide about using diigo on the Jobs&Careers tab on Blackboard (see 'Plan Your Career' section).  If you should find any dead links on http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers - or if you would like to suggest some new ones - please feel free to contact us on careers@cumbria.ac.uk