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Diigo: the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife July 24th, 2006 Just as PC World predicted, the bookmarking / social annotation powerhouse known as Diigo announced their public launch today. While others have been quick to launch a legion of bookmarking sites that are all nearly identical to one another, Diigo’s developers have taken the time necessary to produce the most substantive collection of annotation, blogging, and research tools available under one roof. Those who think that Diigo is “just another” bookmarking site are in for a big surprise when they start to explore the real capabilities of this little beast. When I first mentioned Diigo back in February, I stated that my favorite feature was the ability to bookmark across multiple platforms (such as Binklist, Furl, RawSugar, etc.) but what I didn’t realize is that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. “What are these great features?” you’re asking. Let’s take a look at some of them. First of all, the key to unlocking the secret world of Diigo is the toolbar. This tiny piece of software allows the whole of the internet to become an interactive work station. While the toolbar contains the standard bookmarking and search features you would expect, it also allows you to use the real gem of this suite: the Content Selection Menu. The Content Selection Menu is an innocent-looking little drop down menu that appears whenever you highlight some text (this feature can be turned on or off via the options menu on the toolbar.) The menu contains three categories of sub-menus: Diigo, Search, and Copy.

The Diigo sub-menu allows you to highlight selected text or to blog the text with Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, or Typepad. The highlight can be set to either public or private visibility. The private highlighting is particularly useful if you’re doing any sort of research that involves keeping track of bits of information from all over the web. The public highlighting is great for annotating web pages with “sticky notes” that other Diigo users can see when hovering over the highlighted text. One more important feature here is the ability to forward the web page without having to go through the trouble of composing an email to do it. So in one fell swoop you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, and forward without ever having to leave the web page. (One minor correction: the highlighting does not become publicly visible unless a public Sticky Note has been attached.) In the Search sub-menu you will find the ability to search your selected text across a potentially infinite number of search engines and online resources. The stock search menu comes loaded with about ten categories, each containing multiple resources. Whether you want to search a standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo, a blogging resource such as Technorati, News, Shopping, Music, Bookmarking sites, they’re all there, and much more. In addition, the search menu is fully cusomizable. Don’t need a certain category? No problem, just delete it. Want to add you own category? That’s no problem either. You can add, remove, and rearrange ’til your heart’s content. The Copy menu is short and sweet. And I do mean sweet! As much as I love all of the other features Diigo has to offer, this is quite possibly the one “must have” feature that seals the deal for me. This sub-menu has only two offerings: Without format, and With format. Anyone who has needed to cut & paste text from a web site into a blog entry, email, or word processing document should know the frustration of having to unformat the text in order to make it usable in your document. I had gotten to the point of just keeping Notepad open in order to quickly (and I use that term very loosely) unformat text before pasting it into my documents. Now with a single click I can strip the text of its formatting, making it ready to insert into the document of my choice. Like I said…sweet! I could go on and on about the wonders of Diigo, but you really aren’t going to gain a full appreciation for it until you give it try yourself. If all of these features (and I didn’t even cover them all) seem a little overwhelming, don’t worry. There is an extensive help section to guide you through. Why wait for Web 2.0 to come to your favorite sites when you can carry this cutting-edge tool wherever you go? Posted by Reginald Freeman

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::