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Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation: the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed. Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments. The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo. The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page wisely noted: Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick. This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available. On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference. All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services. My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community. Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you. Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article. There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities. The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice. Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools 11.13.2006 @ 11:07 AM — Filed under: Social Bookmarking

SOURCING TIP: And Diigo was its name-O One thing I have been ranting about (online and offline) is the need for a tool that will allow researchers to seemlessly share their intelligence. Imagine (as I often have) the time that would be saved if I were to discover a resume online and then see a note left by one of my co-workers that reads, "Been here, done that and submitted the candidate." Wowzers! That would really cut-down on duplication of efforts wouldn't it?

Okay, so let me show you something  I really like and am recommending that research teams use - Diigo. This FREE product has enough features that I would willingly pay for it and from me, that is a high compliment. Here are a few highlights from the VERY LONG list of features they offer. (Man, these guy are good!) A few highlights from their website... The Best Web Annotation Service: Add highlights and sticky notes on any web page, anywhere, and access them anywhere. A Great Webpage Clipping Tool: Highlighted portions of any webpage are clipped and collected centrally, which can be shared and searched. An All-in-One Bookmarking Tool: Bookmark webpages to Diigo, local folder, del.icio.us , Simpy, Furl, Spurl... and make them permanently cached and full-text searchable. A Great Collaborative Platform: Share and interact on online findings, complete with highlights and sticky notes. The Most Customizable Search Tool: Like Google's toolbar, but far more customizable, so you can access any search service with one-click --- music, maps, references, local library, New York Times, ... Unique Content Selection Menu: Interact with any word on a webpage just by selecting it, no click needed! - highlight, search, look up - whatever you you want!

With a virtual highlighter and digital sticky notes, now you can highlight & jot down your comments directly on any part of a webpage and scan through all your research findings quickly. Keep your annotations private or share with others. Exchange viewpoints on any specific area of a webpage - great for collaboration or debating an issue. Tags and full-text search on everything make it extremely easy to organize and find stuff - no need to fumble with folders and subfolders. You control the privacy setting on what can be seen by public or kept private. Need someone to pay special attention to a particular section of a webpage? You can forward a webpage with your highlights & Sticky notes. For further interactions, your friends can append their comments under your notes right on the page.Discover relevant / new content based on specific users, topics of interest, recommendations, hot lists, and more. For example, to discover high quality contents on some subject, check out bookmarks under specific tags - remember these represent the joint effort of lots of people.   ** Now here is something that I think is a killer feature! I download the Diigo toolbar and when I come to a page that has been annotated, I am notified (see arrow). I can set this to show me only the notes I have left behind or, the public notes of others. And get this, once I set up my free web-based account, I share that info (my log-in) with my co-workers and all of the annotations we mark private are only seen by us. (Wink) Ahhh... now this is a tool worth noting, using and (above all else) sharing with other researchers on your team. (Click here for virtual tour of their product.) 4-Star recommendation!!!

I have only used 1 product in this genre: Google Notebook. In my experience it integrates tightly with Firefox, has a right click contextual menu option, ability to publicize or privatize multiple notebooks, etc.

I use Google Notebook, which is essentially the same thing. It has really helped me and changed the way I browse.

Sometimes bookmarking something you want to reference later doesn't quite do the trick since the page might change or you just can't remember what it was you found so interesting.

To use the highlight and find feature, you just type in the textbox that you use for normal searching but this time either click on the button for each word of the search term or the highlighter button. It sounds like a lot involved with the toolbar, but really once you start to use it, you will grow to love it. I mentioned that Diigo is not only a social bookmarking service, but also a social annotation service. Diigo lets you highlight any text on any site and bookmark the page saving the highlighted text. Once the bookmark is saved, the next time you visit the bookmarked page, you will still see the text you highlighted, but this time with a blue underline. You can save multiple highlights on a page and even save sticky notes to each highlighted text area that you saved. This is excellent because there are many times that I have wanted to keep a note of something specific on a site and couldn’t and later on forget why I bookmarked it in the first place. Now I can keep notes on pages so I know what I was thinking at the time. On top of all of this though is that you can set public sticky notes. Meaning that when a Diigo user is to set a note to public on a page, any other Diigo user will see the note as well when viewing it. I also should note that in order to save a public note, you must have atleast two friends to help cut down on abuse with notes on sites. Diigo has many other great features. One feature that caught my eye was the importing of bookmarks. Instead of importing a saved file to Diigo, it will actually open a popup listing all your bookmarks from your browser and let you import each on all at once or individually. It also tags them all by default using the tag, “Links” along with the name of the folder it was found in from your bookmarks directory. This is great because I don’t have to make any file or anything to import bookmarks. Another feature that I thought was interesting search page for Diigo. Diigo has searching in the interface itself, but unlike other services, it also has its own search page that lets anyone search Diigo (even if you aren’t a member). Instead of showing results in the Diigo’s website itself, it will show results on a page in a format much like Google’s which makes it a whole lot better, in my opinion. Another feature that Diigo has is friends. You can add friends to your bookmarks page so you can easily view their bookmarks when you want.