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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.

Rival Clipmarks offers some similar annotation features.

t they’re offering a “better del.icio.us”

Diigo isn’t a terrible product, but I think it’s safe to say it’s going nowhere. Aside from the few hundred users who find the additional features useful, it’s unlikely to see any real adoption.

As I said in an email to you guys, I’m sorry for being so tactless about this - and you’re right that I didn’t give a fair run down of your features. Nonetheless, I do wonder if you might struggle to differentiate the offering in this market.

Best thing about Diigo by far is the inadvertent smiling walrus in the logo. The site’s starting a footrace that’s already over, but that walrus is seriously cute!

These services depend on volume to experience any success at all, being collective intelligence models.

If you have ever tried to use it I can assure you it is pretty painful. I am not sure if it is something personal to me, but I find their UI design very painful.

I say that review was spot on except for the line: “Diigo isn’t a terrible product”

Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares

If you’re looking for some awesome blogging and research tools in addition to everything you’d expect in a bookmarking service, then explore the depth of services that Diigo has to offer. In my opinion Diigo isn’t just a tool, it’s more akin to a household appliance.

This space is seriously crowed!

“Diigolet” (no Flock version yet)

I hate it when I read a nice blog post and at the bottom they have a “Liked this Article? Bookmark us!” section, and there are 26 entries (no kidding!).

Diigo is different, not because it can’t do what the other services do. It’s different because it puts the user’s needs first and centre, instead of using the user for information aggregation purposes.

32. the Wandering Author - July 29, 2006 What I don’t understand is why anyone should care about the opinion of a blogger who apparently posts without even knowing anything about his subject. I spend a lot of time doing research, some of it on the Internet. I have a whole, long list of somewhat nice tools I have come across. Most of them are things I might use occasionally. I would never even think of adding toolbars for most of them, or setting up a permanent tab in Firefox to keep them always available - I’d just clutter up my workspace. But that is exactly what I have done with Diigo - I installed their toolbar and I set up a permanent Firefox tab for them. Why? I can share bookmarks with others when I need to, but much more importantly, I can highlight, annotate, clip, and bookmark any Web content I choose, all in one central, convenient spot. Diigo is like a well-loved research notebook crammed with notes for current projects, past projects, possible future projects. Unlike most of the bookmarking “services”, I can go back to a page and see my own notes reminding me of the thought which prompted me to bookmark it. There is nothing else that even approaches it on the Web, or if there is, I haven’t heard of it. The only other social bookmarking service I consider of any real use is eSnips, which allows me to upload files for sharing with a group of my choice. Which is an entirely different feature. But, I could more easily imagine Diigo adding that functionality to their existing site than I could imagine eSnips catching up to Diigo. Personally, I hope both eSnips and Diigo survive, but if only one of them is to be a success, my vote is firmly with Diigo. As for all the other, popular social bookmarking sites out there - yes, it was a somewhat interesting idea, but they have already been left in the dust by Diigo. Calling Diigo “just another” site like the others is as absurd as it would be to label the first interstellar spaceship “just another aircraft”. Yes, I can think of features or tweaks I wish Diigo would add. But they’re just starting out. I’m sure the first interstellar spacecraft will need a few refits, too. But that’s no reason to suggest we might as well all stay on Earth and ignore the rest of the Universe. Diigo opens up a much wider universe on the Web to me, and to many others. To all of you who don’t care - enjoy being stranded in your little backwater pond as it stagnates - I will be out surfing the whole wide ocean of data out there. And I won’t waste any time worrying about you and your plight; after all, you brought it on yourselves by your apathy.

The question is: does anybody care?