Group items tagged

Diigo is an incremental evolution in human-information interaction. It combines web annotation, which I’ve written about several times, with the social construction of knowledge. It embraces tagging and social bookmarking, as many now are, and extends it to the next step, social annotation. Diigo’s online service approach addresses several problems of web browsing. First, how do I preserve this information I’ve found on the web? You bookmark it. But what if the page moves or is removed? With Diigo, when you bookmark, a copy of the page is saved on Diigo’s servers. Now that I’ve found and saved the page, how do I interact with it? Our model is how we interact with paper documents; We highlight and we make notes. Diigo enables you to both highlight and add notes. That stuff is great, but it gets better. Diigo allows you to make your annotations public. A user of the service see’s the public annotations of other Diigo users. In the future, Diigo will allow the creation of groups. With Google’s PageRank and with social tagging, we find information by the wisdom of the crowd, by word-of-mouth. With Diigo it is now easier than ever to share our collective thoughts on that information-our interpretations, extensions, criticisms and associations. Bringing us full circle, Diigo allows you to tag your bookmarks, and see the tags of other Diigo users. More help finding the information, the comments, and then adding your own. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Diigo: Another Del.icio.us? by Jason Hahn Diigo (pronounced “deego”) is a brand new social annotation site.  Social annotation is “a superset of social bookmarking,” the site (www.diigo.com) says.  It is similar to del.icio.us in that it is a social bookmarking tool, and even uses the del.icio.us API to give users the ability to simultaneously tag sites on both their Diigo and del.icio.us accounts. The key differentiation between Diigo and del.icio.us is in the specialized annotation features of Diigo.  Users can highlight specific paragraphs or images on a page and post either public or private sticky notes that can be shared with other users who can choose to respond to your sticky notes.  These annotations can be saved for later review and can also be forwarded through e-mail. This further capability and functionality of specialized annotation features is primarily achieved through the Diigo toolbar.  The toolbar allows the user to search through numerous resources and also allows the user to bookmark sites of interest.  The Inbox on the toolbar lets users keep up-to-date with their tags. Though this may put Diigo in contention with del.icio.us, these two sites can also be seen as complements to one another.  Regardless, it seems that social bookmarking is quickly becoming a battleground that leaves the door open to new competitors with fresh ideas, and that annotation may become a key to success in the arena.