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.

Diigo Introduces WebSlides Sep 6th, 2007 by moultriecreek The folks at Diigo have been busy adding new features to their research-friendly bookmark platform. Today they introduced WebSlides which allows users to select a group of bookmarks, arrange them in a specific order and turn them into a slideshow. What is really cool about this is viewers are looking at a show of live sites - not screenshots. Slideshow creators can include background music - or even narration - to the show although trying to keep the audio and video synched is a stretch. WebSlides is still in beta, but you can view several sample slideshows to get a feel for the system. One of them is even about genealogy.

Wow is not a good enough word for this! lol I enjoyed your WebSlide presentation…. Janice

It was a lovely presentation, indeed! And thank you for featuring my little home town’s website as an example; I got TONS of people stopping by and taking a look. Much appreciated!

Flock + Diigo + Wordpress = Disruptive Leap

But there is one thing missing, which is being able to store bookmarks and share them with friends. Sure, there are a few great social networking sites out there, del.icio.us being one of them. But they lack the ability to highlight parts of a story and add sticky notes that stays on that website. Diigo offers these two brilliant features via their Toolbar. It’s just like when you read an interesting book and highlight the important parts and somtimes add a comment via a Post-It note. Not another Toolbar you say. Well, Diigo has actually replaced all my other toolbars. Flock offers a toolbar with favorites which is more than enough to cover my favorite online destination hangouts: Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Wikipedia et cetera. All other bookmarks are tagged in Diigo and News I get directly to Flock via RSS feeds.

I spent this afternoon installing, connecting and testing the above applications and instantly my online experience and productivity took a huge forward leap