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Special preview: DEMOfall '07 highlights A new crop of startups take the stage to pitch their wares, and as usual, the accent is on Web 2.0 and collaboration

Access to and the sharing of information is this year's theme with companies demonstrating tools for team collaboration, tracking online information, information filtering, and a technology that is harder to explain than use: Turning the Web in a participatory medium for bookmarking, clipping, and discussion sharing. Diigo is both the name of the product and the company that turns a Web site into a "participatory" site, according to Wade Ren, CEO and co-founder. "Diigo doesn't need enterprise adoption to work, but the more people who do adopt it, the better it is," says Ren. Diigo allows users to highlight portions of a Web site and add comments, using the design concept of a sticky note or a cartoon bubble. The note is persistent, so next time the user opens the site, the note will be there. The tool is a browser plug-in that can be downloaded and placed in the IE or Firefox tool bar. While wikis like Wikipedia make sets of pages writable and editable, Diigo makes the entire Web a writable media, according to Ren.

Diigo, which bills itself as a “social annotation” tool (previous coverage here), will present its platform at DEMOfall. Rather than just compiling interesting data found online, the platform allows you to organize by bookmarking, highlighting, and clipping only the most relevant elements of sites, including videos, and then adding sticky notes with annotations. These can then in turn be used to create a slideshows (Diigo’s WebSlides), that according to Diigo can be used by groups in collaborative efforts or presentations. In fact, it’s this community/collaborative element that Diigo hopes will help their service stand out from an already crowded space. In theory users will be driven to congregate around topics, feeding these with their own ideas and reflections through personal clippings and annotations, all the while discovering other collaborators on the same topics.

Recently, I found another very useful function for Diigo, and that is having it aid me in my study of the Spanish language. I am trying to brush up on my skills in time for a job interview, and am meeting with a friend each week to discuss an article (in Spanish) that we have both read. I am using the Diigo comment tool to translate any words in the passage I don't know. That way, when I reread the text, I don't have to rely on the translation, but can refer to it if needed. It is so convenient, and I can't wait to learn more Spanish using Diigo. Has anyone else found that Diigo has aided them in other ways? Are there other cool features I should know about?

I am thoroughly enjoying using Diigo for educational purposes. I don't think I will really get into sharing my articles and comments until I have more friends on there, and figure out how to use it so that only they can see my comments. But I love setting it to private and using the highlight, bookmark and comments features to read online for my classes.

I know I put Diigo out there in front of you as a feedback medium and then backed away from it. However, in my use since then, it is holding up well. For my personal scholarship, it’s holding up really well - it saves my highlights and “sticky notes” and there’s great potential for organizing libraries of articles. I’m still using del.icio.us for general bookmarking, but I use Diigo when I really need to get down to business with an online resource. And, I can make my work private or public, and I’m learning how to navigate through that. So, I highly recommend it for this purpose.

3. Diigo (www.diigo.com). I’m just beginning to use this tool and don’t understand it thoroughly yet. It’s a social networking tool, but more so for my purposes it’s a way to highlight and annotate web pages and save them for future reference. You can simply read a web page and highlight interesting points, or you can also attach “sticky notes” to help you remember what you thought as you were reading it. You can make your work private or share it with the world - your choice. I’ve been hearing buzz about other ways to use Diigo, like for bookmarking. For me, though, I see two primary uses. One is for my personal scholarship. My job requires me to read a great deal, and more and more of the material is online. To avoid printing reams of articles and then having the problem of where to store them, I can use Diigo as a storage and organization system for my personal library. A second use is for evaluation. My job also requires me to evaluate student work that often takes the form of web pages. (I’ve become quite addicted to Word’s powerful annotation features for assignments submitted in that format.) With Diigo, I can comment upon their work directly on the page and then share the feedback with the student privately. So far, the best way to do this seems to be to set up a group of two, but there may be better ways. You can also have Diigo collect your annotations and send them to a “Friend.” Think about the stacks of paper this process saves.

Diigo: social book marking site, also allows users to annotate websites and share with others

The unforeseen laptop tragedy has given me a new appreciation as to why it’s useful to have your bookmarks stored online.