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.

Permanently highlight and annotate text on any webpage with Diigo Have you ever bookmarked a web page, but upon returning had to re-read it to find what it was that you found interesting ? Have you ever wished you could add your notes and thoughts to web pages, the same way you would on paper ? Do you want to save, tag and share only the highlights of a web page ? Enter Diigo. Diigo lets you permanently highlight, annotate, tag and manage text from any website. When you view your bookmarks you can also view the sections you highlighted and the notes you wrote. It is much more useful than a mere “social bookmarking” service such as del.icio.us, Furl, or Digg. Diigo is my current “killer application”. Read detailed reviews at CNET and TechCrunch, or go ahead and install it.

I received an email the other week asking me to take part in and review a  new service which finally launched outright this week called "Diigo".It's nice to know that people read my blog, enjoy what I ramble on about and would like me to comment on it, but anyway, on with the review.Diigo is a not your usual social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or social commentary site like Reddit or Digg, they call it a "Social Annotation website".They have a toolbar that integrates with Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer that allows you to add "Sticky notes" to pages, post the pages to a del.icio.us-type bookmarking service (and del.icio.us itself plus others), forward highlighted text via email to a friend and, most importantly, add comments to webpages which other users can then view (or you could choose to make them private but that's hardly the point of a social annotation site now is it?!).After you have your Diigo account, you'll be prompted to install the relevant toolbar for your browser (Sorry Safari fans, I don't think you're supported yet), once that's installed and you've restarted your browser the fun begins!The annotation system is accessed via a your context menu (right-click on the webpage):

Best Web sites for Teaching and Learning

foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration

encourage a community of learners to explore and discover