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Diigo: sharing and publishing bookmarks with tags and little comments attached to them is nice, but providing detailed annotations directly onto Web pages is even nicer, and Diigo is definitely leading the pack there. Annotations used to require the use of a dedicated plugin with initial releases of the application, but the company listened to persistent requests from users (including myself), and developed a plugin-free version as well. Definitely worth checking if you consider your bookmarking tool as a real productivity application.

8. Ramon deSilva  |  January 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm Ismael, That was an interesting writeup. You covered a number of sites, and offered useful capsule summaries. I’ve looked over many of the sites you mention, and used del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and Diigo. They are all good sites for bookmarking. But I think you overlooked a few points about Diigo that make it different from, and far superior to, any of the other sites. 1. As well as the ability to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, you can collect the annotations from any set of pages (say, those tagged web-2.0-services) into a single source, with original URLs noted, to simplify your research. 2: The Diigo toolbar allows you to place all the search tools you might want, grouped by purpose, in a single button, so you can easily use multiple search tools for extensive research. The integration of this with bookmarking and annotation capabilities makes Diigo the most full-featured, capable research tool available. Diigo has other abilities; too many to list here. Overall, Diigo will save anyone who spends much time doing research on the Internet time and effort. True, you need to spend a bit of time learning all the features so you can incorporate them into your work habits, but the effort will pay off many times over. Overall, Diigo is the one service I find I cannot live without. There are other tools out there that do a nice job of this or that, and I use some of them. But Diigo is the only one I depend on throughout the day and could not live without.

How many users would like a del.icio.us++ where they can not only bookmark the URL, but also highlight specific parts of the page? Personally, I can’t live without highlighting: it helps me re-read the page, or realize that I’ve seen it before. -Laurent

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.