Group items tagged

Annotation - Content Highlighting and Notes The key feature of Diigo is annotation. Users can bookmark a page and highlight text and images on the page to take note of. Highlights on a page by the user will then save and appear as a blue dashed underline whenever they visit the site again. Hovering over a highlight will bring up a menu where the user can optionally add a note to the highlight and make the note private or public. Highlighted text with notes attached to them will appear as a solid underline in blue. Also, if you browse to a site that other Diigo users have highlighted or added notes to, you will see their highlights on the page (if saved publicly) colored in orange. Being able to bookmark and annotate a page is very helpful. In terms of research, you can bookmark and annotate all the sites related to the topic you are researching. When your done getting all the information you need, select all the bookmarks in the “My Bookmarks” area and select in the top right drop down, “Extract highlights.” This will then grab all your notes from all the sources you’ve saved and display them on a clean page for you to look over and print. This is a great tool for bloggers as well. Gather up all your sources for a post your working on, add your notes, and when ready, select all the bookmarks and blog about it using Diigo’s built in blogging tool (explained below). Blogging I personally prefer blogging straight through my WordPress installation, but for those of you that want to take notes, gather sources, and easily publish a post to your blog, Diigo may be your solution. Diigo allows you to add multiple blogs to your account, verify them, and easily publish a post, however you may only publish and cannot manage old entries. What I like is that while you browse the web and you come across a site talking about a specific topic you want to expand on, you can right click and select, “Blog This,” which will then direct you to the blogging area where you can write your post along with that site being your source. The other method is by simply going to your bookmarks section and selecting a bookmark, or multiple bookmarks, that you want to write about and then selecting the “Blog This” option from the top right drop down menu. All the sources, highlighted text, and notes will be included in the post document, which you can easily remove if needed, ready for you to write. It’s not an entire blogging platform, just a simple publishing tool that works. Browser Toolbar and Bookmarklet The Diigo toolbar, available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, brings most of Diigo’s features right to your browser. The toolbar allows you to easily bookmark websites, highlight and note pages, search documents for keywords, search terms in a page using your favorite search engine, and it even brings all bookmarks right to the toolbar. The toolbar also is what makes it possible for you to see highlighted text and notes that you and other users have made on websites you visit. Bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking the Diigo button and filling in the tags and highlighting just involves you highlighting the text you want to save. One of my favorite features is the “QuickD” button (not in the above screenshot) that I recently came across. The QuickD button allows you to save a bookmark to Diigo with one click without needing the original Diigo popup to appear and adds a default tag to it (you may also fill in tags in the search box of the toolbar to tag it) so you can just click and go. What if you don’t want to install an extension to your browser? That’s fine because Diigo also provides it’s user with Diigolet, a browser bookmarklet that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate any website as well as view annotations on pages left by other Diigo users.

Summary Most of my readers are probably saying: "Phil has tested way too many betas!" Summing some of these developments up is rather like holding water in a net. For once I can defer this task to someone more capable than myself: "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 mark-up and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." Conclusion As Chris Shipley, DEMO's executive producer says: "It would be easy to dismiss Diigo as yet-another social bookmarking tool, but that would be a big mistake." In this instance Chris has not overstated a development's capability. Webslides embedded and noted inside a blog can spotlight any series of posts and topics with "live" pages and advertisements. If we think just slightly outside the box here it is not difficult to imagine video and audio annotation following highlighted text from several pages for an on-the-fly sales pitch or dissertation on any subject. Information, knowledge and interests gathered around people rather than people running to find fragments of data. This is Web 3.0 (if there is such a thing) in the development stages.

11. Oliver Schwenke  |  January 17th, 2007 at 1:28 am I have to agree with Ramon and the other Diigo users who left a comment here. In my opinion, nothing comes close to Diigo feature-wise.

3. Keith Manning  |  January 17th, 2007 at 7:57 am My comment is mostly for serious business use — mostly saving and sharing research. Diigo is already a great personal tool. I have tried several, and found that Onfolio was the best for my needs (until it was bought by the Evil Empire and emasculated). However, I am already finding Diigo to be better than Onfolio was at its best. I am anxiously awaiting the groups feature of Diigo. If it works as advertised, it will make Diigo a killer application for my company. It is already our personal research bookmarker. With groups, it will become a workgroup bookmarker, with the ability to collaborate in creating a bookmark set for each project. It promises to also give us flexible group definitions to support multiple, overlapping workgroups. Since our usage is commercial, we also want privacy. The “social” nature of some sites can be a positive disadvantage for users like ours. We would also prefer a paid service; I trust a service that has a fee-based business model more than I trust a supplier that is making money by indirect means. Also, I abhor intrusive advertising and cross linking. Having sung the praises of Diigo for our serious business application, I should add that we also use it for personal, more trivial purposes. Like sharing gift ideas, or discussing new gadgets. We used to use a private (TypePad) group blog for this, but since getting Diigo, the blog has fallen into disuse, and we tend to Diigo-annotated pages instead — note that Diigo has now become a transitive verb, like Tivo. -Keith

14. Ismael Ghalimi  |  January 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm Ramon, Oliver, Keith, Reading through your comments, it seems to me that Diigo is getting close to becoming a full fledged enterprise bookmarking tool in its own right. That’s pretty good news to me, for I hate having only one player in any category I cover. Let’s see how it compares to Connectbeam and the upcoming Cogenz down the road. Best regards -Ismael

Best Online Bookmarking Application Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote: Note: if you cannot see the voting form, please follow this link.