Group items tagged

Diigo builds on the MyStickies concept and fuses it with a social bookmarking system similar to Del.icio.us. The result is the best web-clipping/collaboration/bookmarking/thought-organizing tool out there. Once you've installed Diigo, you'll get a Diigo tool bar at the top of your browser. Diigo also offers a little javascript link you can drag into your links bar that essentially does the same thing without taking up as much room. Using the Diigo tool bar you can highlight text on a web page, add sticky notes, bookmark and tag a page, and see public comments made by other Diigo users.

But the feature that catapults Diigo into the stratosphere in my mind is its ability to search annotations.  If you do any blogging, I'm sure you know why this is such a helpful tool. Now I can annotate facts and figures on web pages and tag them. In the future, when I desperately need references and links for an article, I have a whole database of searchable stickies and bookmarks. When I return to the web pages I've annotated, there are all my notes and highlights. Also, since all of my Diigo data is out in the cloud, I can access it from any computer.

Diigo, "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff", the web2.0 social bookmarks and annotation service, has finally announced going public today!*I've been waiting for this to write about it, well here it goes:Diigo is a great, no, a fantastic tool(!) Not only for bookmarking but also for research, blogging and a must for any social bookmark mania. It's a kind if mix between del.icio.us (social bookmarks), Wizlite (web highlight and notes), Onlywire (multi post to social bookmarks), with Blogging support. Diigo vs Flock: In fact, there are some similarities with Flock, the web 2.0 browser, though you can install Diigo on Flock you'll get some close features, like: blogging: They both support WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and MovableType for now (+Dupral for Flock) exempt that Diigo, instead of a blog editor, uses the online blog editor.+ In flock you can save your post for later, in Diigo you can clip the text you want and blog from your bookmarks later on. (See an example, select all and expand to see what I mean.) Bookmarking: Both have a one click bookmark. Flock can sync and bookmark to Shadows and deli.cio.us. Diigo's, called QuickD, let's you set a custom tag and also can simultaneous bookmark to: de.licio.us, BlinkList, Furl, Netvouz, RawSugar, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo, locally... and of course at Diigo! Search: They both have good search but very different. Flock can search though bookmarks, history, the web and add search plugins like in Firefox. Else Diigo let's you completely customize, add search engines and display them in one or more dropdown menus on the toolbar. (For example, I customized a part of mine for searching though social bookmarks: digg, del.icio.us popular, Netvouz, Hatena...and the same menu that will search my bookmarks.) And at the Diigo website there's an in-page pop-up advanced search which let's you search tags, url, title, phrase, in comments, in highlight or anywhere for only user's or community bookmarks.So using both, Diigo AND Flock, makes you someone very very... social!? ;-)Highlighting:This is the main interesting feature in Diigo.You may not have the Flock's RSS reader support*, nor the drag and drop Flickr or PhotoBucket toolbars but you can Clip text and images, Highlight, Web notes and Aggregate the clippings. Aggregating clippings lets you collect text on the web and later view them all on one page, very useful for research and blogging. See the screenshot. Diigo's highlighting styles Other special features: A bookmark status icon on the toolbar shows if the page has been bookmarked by you, has been commented by any Diigo user or both.Tag cloud which is also a batch tag manager. [Screenshot]Batch selected: Set the selected bookmarks to public/private, mark as read/un-read, expand details or delete them. Quick access: A customizable drop down menu to quickly access any bookmarks of a certain tag. Forward: Email link AND clipping. (usually it's just the link.)Highlight: Search terms like the Google toolbar but also possible on bookmarks and inside non expanded clippings.Tagging: They can be comma OR space separated!Delete: This is a small detail and would be better shown in a video but I love it: When you delete a bookmark it 'flies out' and disappears with a zooming effect! ...and of course it's a one click delete. + all the usual features, and not so usual features like: import directly from browser bookmarks and del.icio.us, follow a tag, user or search results, RSS links, Unicode support, an Ajax linkroll generator and much more... This without mentioning what's comming up! (API included!)As you see, they have done many updates since they started in Decamber. If you want to see more there's a recent review by John from Libraryclips and very good and complete help pages with screen-shots at Diigo.Note: The toolbar exists for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock, but incase you find yourself in an internet cafe, there's also an in-page bookmarklet for bookmarking. All the rest, annotation, blogging... comes with it's the toolbar.I've used, and still use now, the Diigo toolbar along many other extensions, where in the beginning it did have some compability problems, it's been a while I haven't had any.*I want to apologise to all the diigo team for the other day with a special thanks to Maggie Tsai for her kind understanding and reaction. -Some of you may know what it is, if you don't I won't tell you. (><") ::Shame::

Social search has a brand new contender - Diigo Currently social search appears to be the hottest topic on the internet. The theory is that more useful and meaningful search results can be gathered regarding the true value of sites by getting users to recommend websites rather than utilising a series of computer generated algorithms.Traditional search engine results, such as those supplied by Google and Yahoo!, are primarily based on objective criteria such as counts of the backlinks from other sites. These links are seen as votes on the importance of that page for a given set of criteria. Social search allows users to assign their own votes regarding which sites are worthwhile, by sharing bookmarks of favourite sites, adding their own subject tagging, or making annotations to listings. This creates a more subjective set of results, which some feel can more accurately reflect which sites are most meaningful for particular search terms. The concept of social search has been continually evolving since social bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Shadows first appeared through to more involved services such the social networking sites MySpace and MyWeb, or the social news source Digg.Now a new player has appeared on the scene. Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) which was launched on Monday aims to combine a number of features such as shared bookmarking, blogging and web page tagging into a single service along with a powerful toolbar search tool.Diigo promotes itself as an online social research and "social annotation" tool, allowing users to:"Collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere”. By letting users quickly create their own comment on sites as well as highlight, clip or make sticky-notes for webpages, and providing access to organic search or their own social search results, which can be adjusted to suite the users preferences, Diigo has created a service with several interesting resource sharing and community promotion features. By taking onboard search features normally associated with search toolbar extension filters such as the ability to restrict keyword searches to the site you're currently viewing, the usability of the search functions have been increased to make this a useful service regardless of whether the user is looking to fully immerse themselves in the online social environment.While there is currently no direct official link between social search results and organic results obtained on the traditional search engines, many users have recently started to find information from the likes of MySpace creeping in. With Google and Yahoo! both having their own networks it looks likely that more of the features and results will either be merged together or be offered alongside each other so that you can get different sets of results depending on your preferred search method.Whether Diigo is here to stay or is set to quickly disappear like many other social search sites, remains to be seen, however the simple customisable interface and powerful set of useful tools make this one of the best offerings for some time.