Group items tagged

Make way, Del.icio.us! Diigo is here, and it's changing the way people use and, in true Web 2.0 fashion, interact with the Internet.

If you like del.icio.us, you will love Diigo.I will not be the first to say it, but Diigo is like del.icio.us on steriods. Diigo bookmarks your favorite sites, uses tags to classify your bookmarks, allows you to make bookmarks private or public. It can even automatically post your latest saves to your blog.

Diigo also makes it more-than-easy to email a web site to a friend. I like Google Reader for the same reason, but Diigo out-shines even Google Reader. Highlight the text on a page that you want your friend to see and that text will be included when you email the page to them. Eliminates the "Huh? Why did she send me this link?" problem.

Social Annotation I have just read about a company currently in private beta called Diigo, which is in the business of social annotation (SA). Apparently SA is a superset of social bookmarking or tagging, which is of course the piece de resistance of ‘Web 2.0′. The question is can SA be an even better route to getting aquired by MAGY? Don’t quite me on ‘MAGY’ though since I am not sure what order those names should go in… I had been thinking about SA for some time but did not have the time / resources to get anything together for public showing - but this might be a good reason to do so. Of course given my record with getting code up on my blog I won’t have a sample till next year this time. Anyhow, the possiblities for SA are much more attractive than social bookmarking in my mind. With social annotations (at least what I consider it to be) I can surf to any web page and place tagged sticky notes (private or public) in a browser agnostic fashion that will contain my comments and refer to a certain block in the web page DOM. Then I can go to some central place to view / oranize my comments and can also subscribe to RSS of other people’s comments on those pages or from particular people.

The main problem that I have with Diigo (from the looks of their Flash demo) is that I need to install their toolbar - yuck!

The useful part of these systems for end users is that they can tag particular bits of content on a page and find exactly what they were referring to with a tag. Then if you combine this idea with microformats and the Semantic Web you might really be cooking with something combustible like methane.

I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done.

2. Sidebar- The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser. 3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items. 4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar. 5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity. 6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.

3. Diigo has shown a committment to listening to its users. Well at least the educational users, and they have been making small changes almost daily since Lisa Parisi held the elluminate session this past Sunday. Maggie Tsai and Wade Ren have been in and out of multiple conversations on Diigo and posting on edubloggers pages (Look up) to actively understand our needs and look to make changed in Diigo to fit the educational model… You can be offended by the “hate” comment Wade made, but this is his company and he wants to make change to satisify folks… I really like delicious since I was introduced to it a year ago. Easy linking, I can tag from a tool bar with comments I can build a passive network… But Delicious is not listening to folks or making changes even though they “introduced” their version 2 about a year ago, and it has not appeared. Even the tech bloggers are taking delicious to task for this. The responsiveness that Wade and Maggie have shown so far is really impressive in my opinion. Just wanted to share my thoughts on why I am continuing to investigate and use Diigo. I know that you feel a bit targeted for “not drinking the coolaid” but I think what you are getting hit hard on is if you don’t like the service you do not have to use it. Or with the participation Wade and Maggie are showing get involved and see if it can become what you would like to see… Just my thoughts, Scott

# Scott Weidigon 02 Apr 2008 at 10:27 pm Jim, I went to post this on Diigo and then hit my back space and went to a different page and lost everything boo… but I thought that I would post here instead. I am becoming more enamored over time with Diigo. At first I didn’t get the hoopla… I don’t “do” facebooks and myspaces etc. and I have enough of a hard time keeping up with twitter (don’t know how coolcatteacher and Dembo follow 1000+ folks… ) so I didn’t think much of the social side. But it could host links and re-post them to delicious so not too bad… here is what is changing my mind. 1. Bookmarking… on one hand it is the same as delicious tags yadda yadda… but I can now tag a s ite, send it to friends in the diigo network and outside of it, forward it to a specific topic group and throw it into a specifically designed list at the same time! That is efficient in my mind. the Twit thing is neat too so I don’t have to tinyurl it and post to twitter… and I can even keep my delicious account updated through Diigo so I don’t have to do double work… (and when i imported it brough my delicious notes that was a nice touch)

2. Annotation/stikites/highlighting. We all research and move information into different places, google notebook, MS OneNote, Zoho Notobook… but those pieces of information are then only our notes and ideas… Diigo’s highlighint and annotation allows you to make any page a conversational document. That is powerful. I just played with it for the first time today and was blown away with ease at which you could do this. those notes can then be seen by any diigo user. The collaborative possibilities are astounding. if you have not tried this or seen it go to http://lisaslingo.blogspot.com and scroll down to the Best Day Ever post. If you have your Diigo sidebar open you will see two notes, and the Highlighing that Steve Kimmel did. Also, I don’t know if it is showing up yet I tagged a sticky note next to the first picture there… my comments appear in the side bar, but I see the note markup and I am thinking others will to eventually, but am not sure. Think of all the times your teachers ahve been trying to teach textmarking but can’t in the Textbooks… now we can do this to the web.

There are tons of social bookmarking sites out there and then there is Diigo. Unlike the other social bookmarking del.licio.us wannbie, I actually like Diigo.

If you are like me, someone who forgets why he bookmark a site the next day, you will find this feature handy. If I look back on my del.licio.us page, I can’t remember why I bookmarked half of the site on it. This I think is going to be really useful for collage student, when they are researching something on the web. They could put annotation on sites they found and share then with their other buddies in Diigo. Having Diigo lets you access another world of the web. You will see public highlights of sites by other Diigo users. There are 3 view modes, all (view all highlights and stickies), private (view only your highlights or stickies) and disable (no view of any highlights or stickies). Same like other social bookmarking services out there, you can subscribe / watch what other people are bookmarking. In Diigo, you can subscribe to a person or a tag and there is this mail looking icon on the Diigo toolbar in your Firefox that will show new bookmarked sites either by someone or some tag you subscribed to.