Victory for History! (Social Bookmarking Soulmates)

I have mentioned more than once how upsetting it is for people who like history to constantly run into that "Oh my god, I HATED history in high school!! You're studying that? Voluntarily?!" attitude. Sometimes I feel like rallying my spirits and spouting off an inspiring speech from Lincoln's oratory, but other times I want to put on my glasses and crawl into the bookstacks at some remote library and lick my wounds.

Recently, though, I have discovered a weapon for the book worms of the world. It is called Diigo. It's a social bookmarking site, allowing users to surf the internet and not only keep track of pages they want to remember, but also to highlight and make comments on these pages. The tool bar that Diigo installs when you sign up for an account will remember you and your highlights, in a very real way personalizing the big bad Net and making it a tool rather than a vast expanse of non-navigable information.

I was sort of forced to join. I mentioned in an earlier post that advanced technology (like blogging, though given my recent forays blogging seems downright simplistic) is not really my bag. Of my own volition, I would never have even gone onto Diigo's homepage. But my arm was twisted, and on a whim today I used some of Diigo's impressive people-searching tools to see if anyone else out there was still interested in history. (I mean to sound only a little melodramatic... the number of wonderfully competent history bloggers that I with even a modest effort have found is impressively high). And lo and behold, with each set of tags that I entered into the search bar, from American History to War to Culture to Depression to Cold War, I got a new crop of people. Lots and lots of teachers. I'm ok with that. One anarchist. Interesting development. So ha! Not only do I voluntarily study history in school, so all these people study history with their free time, in the real world, in real life. :-) So satisfying.

But which one, I wondered, was most like me? And there I ran into a problem. The man who, based on tagging and websites visited most closely fits my set of interests.... is Russian. I would love to tell you all about him, the kinds of things he comments about and how his visited site history would be useful to other history buffs out there, but his profile and all his comments are written in.... Russian. So. A bit out of luck with that one. But there was one who showed up just as much as my Russian friend Pandarra did. Her name , or username is Elsamary.

One of my favorite things about her is that not only does she tag the sort of stuff I do, but she also has libraries for shopping, for cooking, for sewing. Her hobbies all come through, making her approachable and even more fully outlining the everyday usefulness of Diigo. My absolutely favorite thing about her, though, is that in going through some of her tag history I discovered that she does not limit herself to a time period. Rather than looking only at The Depression, or the Civil War of the 1860's, she seems to surf the internet conceptually. When she finds social or cultural conditions caused by economic depression, she goes in search of other sites, facts, histories that elucidate that concept. It seems that this style would allow the searcher to understand patterns in history, and allow both the searcher and the reader to expand their ideas of what the search concept entails.

Thus, it probably goes without saying that her tags are organized conceptually, too. Sometimes they do wander a big... from Chicago history to Obama's election to art auctions in San Francisco, and they aren't super thorough. There are twenty tags for each idea or concept, for instance, but there are enough there to get your own mind going which is the exciting part of finding someone like you, anyway.

In conclusion, even a "second best" was exciting and stimulating. At long last, a victory for the bookworms. Go, Elsamary. :-)