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Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done.

2. Sidebar- The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser. 3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items. 4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar. 5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity. 6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.