Group items tagged

You can use either the Diigo toolbar or bookmarklets, a tiny bookmark applet, to save annotated Web pages without interrupting your Web surfing. If you install the toolbar for either Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the Flock beta browser, whenever you right-click the mouse or highlight something on a Web page, a menu pops up with options to bookmark, forward, search for, or blog about selected content. The toolbar drop-down menu scours four major search engines, as well as within blogs, mapping, news, music, TV, shopping, and reference engines. Choose the Diigo toolbar's Options menu to set privacy preferences.

Let's say you save a recipe for jambalaya but want to add your own secret ingredients. You can highlight, say, step 2 of the recipe and add a Sticky Note describing your own step 2B. The Sticky Notes mini-window appears whenever you roll over the highlighted text on that Web page. Add a Comment instead, and that will show up within your list of bookmarks on Diigo. You can make these annotations private or public to allow comments from other users and cluster a bunch of bookmarks within an album to manage various projects--and export them as a feed. And if you blog, you can highlight text on a site and use the Diigto Toolbar to make a quick post to a WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, or Windows Live Spaces account.

How can you find the good stuff in your bundle of bookmarks? Diigo's advanced search lets you scour the text of pages you've bookmarked--not just the basic titles, tags, and URLs that Del.icio.us goes through--as well as your own highlights and comments. So if you forgot to tag that jambalaya recipe, a Diigo search for "shrimp" should do the trick. And your tag cloud, à la Del.ico.us, shows the most-used topics. As with Del.icio.us, click any tag to see bookmarks that you and other users have made. At this point, many popular Web sites haven't been bookmarked by many Diigo users. Still, Del.icio.us users are migrating to Diigo; one of its most popular tags is imported:del.icio.us.

Judging by common bookmark tags, such as "Web 2.0," the Diigo community is full of tech-savvy users. Still, we find it straightforward enough that a dedicated bookmarking newbie shouldn't have a problem adopting Diigo as a research companion. Diigo is great for taking notes on Web pages and using them to collaborate with other users--and since we started using Diigo, we've lost our appetite for Del.icio.us.

Diigo lets you save, import, tag, highlight, mark up and share Web pages--offering more advanced research tools than Del.icio.us.

Diigo imports bookmarks from elsewhere; tags pages by topic; lets you mark up and share Web pages; has a simple interface; toolbar and bookmarklet allow quick bookmarking; bookmarks simultaneously to rival services; searches text and comments within bookmarks.