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WebSlides - Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… — A new Diigo service– with del.icio.us posting and some interesting annotation possibilities I keep thinking I should switch to Diigo as main posting point for sharing links

the aggregators lead you to articles or sites that you want to save and remember. And for that, I have another favorite tool: Diigo. While it would be easy to describe Diigo as a social bookmarking service, that would make it sound too much like Del.icio.us or Furl or Reddit (all of which I’ve tried and tired of at various times). It’s really more of a research tool with social, collaborative features. Most importantly, Diigo (which is operated through a toolbar that works in the Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers) allows you to bookmark pages on a list that’s saved forever online and accessible from anywhere. No more messing around with your Web browser’s built-in bookmarks, which won’t be available to you if you happen to log into the web from a different computer. Just as fun, Diigo makes it easy to highlight passages within a Web page—so you can return later and see what it was that caught your attention—and even attach floating “sticky notes.”

You can also attach tags to your bookmarks to make them easier to find later on, and you can click on individual tags to see what other Diigo users are bookmarking publicly under those tags. (As a journalist, I’m secretive enough about what I’m researching online that I tend to keep my Diigo bookmarks private.) In late March, Diigo rolled out Version 3 of its system, which includes enhanced “social browsing” features such as the ability to see how other people have annotated a given Web page, follow what your friends are bookmarking, or subscribe to other users’ bookmarks based on tags.

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers). In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet)

What bookmarking applications now need, are new ideas

Diigo, finally, has some of these new ideas. They allow you to highlight text on a page, and share those highlights. You can then view those highlights the next time you see the page, and they are included in your bookmark list. You can also “extract” the highlights: check some items in your list, select “Extract highlights”, and a web page is displayed with a list of the selected items and their highlights. You can also add sticky notes to the highlights, and share them. That way, everyone can see your notes, and even respond to them. There’s also the Diigo toolbar, which has some good extended features. Annotations are for example always displayed, and not only after you clicked the bookmarklet. You can also search via the toolbar, bookmark quick (without entering tags), bookmark to other services simultaneously, and blog about a page. When bookmarking, the toolbar also allows you to immediately add a new comment about the page, something the bookmarklet doesn’t allow. What both the toolbar and the bookmarklet allow, is forwarding the page via mail to a friend, with a customized message and the highlights on the page. I don’t really like toolbars, so I won’t keep this one installed (or I’ll at least hide it), but I think the toolbar can be very helpful for some people.