Diigo is an incremental evolution in human-information interaction. It combines web annotation, which Iโve written about several times, with the social construction of knowledge. It embraces tagging and social bookmarking, as many now are, and extends it to the next step, social annotation.
Diigoโs online service approach addresses several problems of web browsing. First, how do I preserve this information Iโve found on the web? You bookmark it. But what if the page moves or is removed? With Diigo, when you bookmark, a copy of the page is saved on Diigoโs servers.
Now that Iโve found and saved the page, how do I interact with it? Our model is how we interact with paper documents; We highlight and we make notes. Diigo enables you to both highlight and add notes.
That stuff is great, but it gets better. Diigo allows you to make your annotations public. A user of the service seeโs the public annotations of other Diigo users. In the future, Diigo will allow the creation of groups.
With Googleโs PageRank and with social tagging, we find information by the wisdom of the crowd, by word-of-mouth. With Diigo it is now easier than ever to share our collective thoughts on that information-our interpretations, extensions, criticisms and associations.
Bringing us full circle, Diigo allows you to tag your bookmarks, and see the tags of other Diigo users. More help finding the information, the comments, and then adding your own. Itโs a positive feedback loop.