Group items tagged

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.

Diigo is a social bookmarking site that is really giving the current champion, del.icio.us, a run for its money. It does everything that del.icio.us does (including simul-posting to your current del.icio.us account!) and so much more. From highlighting on a page, to adding sticky notes, to sharing bookmarks with groups, it really turns websurfing from a passive experience to a highly active one. Jennifer Dorman created the DEN group in Diigo a little over a week ago and there’s already over 50 members!

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

But honestly, even with their latest release - they have stopped innovating. I checked out Diigo on the recommendation of Mike Fruchter sometime ago via FriendFeed. Since signing up I hadn’t really used it. But, the latest update to delicious broke my Daily Digest series - which was the final straw. And since Diigo allows you to import from Delicious, there really is no switching costs for me. That being said I have been extremely happy with my Diigo experience. Here are six reasons Diigo is better than Delicious

1. It’s more socialDiigo has an extra level of social networking that Delicious does not provide - at least not in a usable manner. You can connect with people that have similar interests based on what you tag. 2. AnnotationsThe annotations feature is very cool. When you bookmark something, you can highlight notable sections to refer to later. And any other Diigo users can see your highlights when they visit the page if they have the toolbar installed. 3. Superior UI and ExperienceAside from all the snazzy features, the core “bookmarks” interface is much better than that of delicious - offering many additional features and better organization. 4. MicrobloggingThe microblogging feature in delicious never got a chance. This is the “daily post” feature that basically posts a digest to your blog of all the bookmarks you have saved over X amount of time. Delicious always had it as an “experimental feature”, for 3 years. Diigo does it so much better, allowing you to post only specific tags to your blog as well as providing more customization features. 5. DiscoveryNow, this is something that delicious did fairly well but is pretty much a product of its large community. But Diigo does a great job at it too, allowing you discover what’s hot across the network but also within a group of friends. It also has a “watchlist” feature that allows you to keep tabs on certain tags in the network. And last, it shows you a river of bookmarks from your network - with a neat tag cloud to see what your community is tagging the most. 6. Better ToolboxYou can import, export. There are widgets, linkrolls, and tagrolls. They offer several ways to interact with the service - through context menu, toolbars, bookmarklets. There’s a Facebook app. You can “save elsewhere” too. So, if you still want to post stuff to delicious (let’s say you have a great community there), you can set that up. What this does is posts your new bookmarks to the other services whenever you post them to Diigo.

All in all Diigo wins hands down. So ditch delicious, sign up, and join me.

You’re browsing sites, left and right. You come across something that interests you and you say to yourself, “Self, this is something worth blogging about on your blog.” But you forget to make a note of why you want to write about it. What will you do? What will you do?

Another tool that helps me is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). It’s a social bookmarking site with abilities far beyond those of mortal bookmarkers

While viewing a web page — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account. But I can also leave notes on that page. These notes can be for my eyes only, or I can make it to where anyone with Diigo who chooses to view anyone’s notes can view them. The purpose of these notes is for me to “mark” parts of a page like I would printed paper. Diigo says you can make notes on web pages for anyone who doesn’t have the toolbar installed. So, conceivably, you could point your visitors to other places and markup the content for further reading. Perhaps you’re commenting on an article that would make more sense to viewers if you could actually show them where on the page you’re talking about.