Group items tagged

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.

Karen has asked me to provide you all with more info on working with Diigo so that those of you who are a bit unsure about what you can do with it can get started. Below I’ve included some of its key features, but I strongly encourage you to visit their help menu, where you can access neat little flash tutorials on how to get started that are far better than anything I can whip up here. Some Diigo Features: Tagging: An easy, user-generated way to categorize and organize your bookmarks Annotation: write sticky notes that can be made public so you can interact and collaborate with others who are reading the same pages. Highlighting: Easy to highlight parts of pages, extract them, and collect them (great for research!) Groups: you can create public and private groups—a great way to organize group projects and add a level of privacy to Diigo that you may feel more comfortable with than making everything public. Privacy: Options for privacy are available on just about all Diigo features Search: You can search not just by tag name, but also titles, notes, highlights, and full text. Blogging Integration: “Blog This” feature allows you to move easily between browsing and blogging. Populate your blog post instantaneously with the highlighted texts you selected while reading a web page - a big time saver. Archiving: Allows you to save EXACT copies of bookmarked pages, which protects you from losing cool stuff that may disappear over time.   Photos: You can collect your favorite photos into albums Subscribe/Post Lists: Bookmark lists can be subscribed on the website and through RSS Community: find new content from specific users or based on tags, hot lists

What does this tool do: It is (still) most valuable as a tool to save and organize your bookmarks, so you will never lose or forget a saved-site again. But the latest upgrade adds much greater depth to previous versions.

To call Diigo just a bookmark organizer is like calling Ella just a singer. But the truth is that your first and most obvious value will come from Diigo’s ability to store and search out your lost bookmarks like no other free program available. You can also highlight and file short sentences within a URL without saving the entire site. Plus you can search text as well as tags and easily forward your best links on to your friends. If you want additional layers of social networking, note taking, and added research ability, this tool satisfies. But you should plan on a gradual ramp up to proficiency. In order to take full advantage of Diigo, it will take some effort to make it sing for you…but in the meantime, it can sure hum.  

Here is what the folks at Diggo have to say about the extension. Several powerful features are combined in the Diigo toolbar to make this a real “power extension” and must-have for anyone who browse a lot of stuffs online. An All-in-One Bookmarking Tool: bookmark to Diigo, delicious, Simpy, furl, spurl and make them permanently cached and full-text searchable. A Powerful Blogging Platform : Annotate webpages and quickly turn them into blogs with a built-in blog editor or enhanced linkrolls. A Great Collaborative Tool: share and interact on online findings, complete with highlights and sticky notes. The Most Customizable Search Tool: like Google’s toolbar, but fully customizable, so you can add any other specialty searches - dictionaries, music, movies, references, and maps. Here is a comment I found via the Mozilla Add-ons Web site that I think fits Diggo perfectly. Diigo is the best bookmarking tool that I’ve tried. And this extension is a must! You can bookmark a page right from your context menu, which includes highlighting parts of the page when you bookmark, and you can also forward a bookmark to someone. I don’t even keep my bookmarks in my browser anymore - I got tired of looking at 100+ jumbled bookmarks in my browser, so now I use the Diigo extension to retrieve them. I like being able to bring them up as-needed, but the rest of the time they’re stored at my Diigo homepage.

If the Internet is your main medium for research, I believe that you know the importance of bookmarking and sharing your findings with colleagues to get the best information possible. Therefore, an online research tool will be very helpful in organizing gathered information while at the same time making it available to others for collaborative purposes. Diigo - a powerful online research tool fits perfectly for this need.

Diigo is a browser plugin that functions as a web highlighter, sticky notes, social bookmarking tool, and a social information network rolled into one. Once you have download and install the Diigo toolbar, you can start bookmarking websites, highlighting texts inside it, leaving comments and more.

Next, the knowledge sharing part of Diigo lets you share and discuss your findings with any available public or private groups. With Diigo, connecting with friends with similar interests can be done effortlessly through content sharing.