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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.

You can use either the Diigo toolbar or bookmarklets, a tiny bookmark applet, to save annotated Web pages without interrupting your Web surfing. If you install the toolbar for either Internet Explorer, Firefox, or the Flock beta browser, whenever you right-click the mouse or highlight something on a Web page, a menu pops up with options to bookmark, forward, search for, or blog about selected content. The toolbar drop-down menu scours four major search engines, as well as within blogs, mapping, news, music, TV, shopping, and reference engines. Choose the Diigo toolbar's Options menu to set privacy preferences.

Let's say you save a recipe for jambalaya but want to add your own secret ingredients. You can highlight, say, step 2 of the recipe and add a Sticky Note describing your own step 2B. The Sticky Notes mini-window appears whenever you roll over the highlighted text on that Web page. Add a Comment instead, and that will show up within your list of bookmarks on Diigo. You can make these annotations private or public to allow comments from other users and cluster a bunch of bookmarks within an album to manage various projects--and export them as a feed. And if you blog, you can highlight text on a site and use the Diigto Toolbar to make a quick post to a WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, or Windows Live Spaces account.

How can you find the good stuff in your bundle of bookmarks? Diigo's advanced search lets you scour the text of pages you've bookmarked--not just the basic titles, tags, and URLs that Del.icio.us goes through--as well as your own highlights and comments. So if you forgot to tag that jambalaya recipe, a Diigo search for "shrimp" should do the trick. And your tag cloud, à la Del.ico.us, shows the most-used topics. As with Del.icio.us, click any tag to see bookmarks that you and other users have made. At this point, many popular Web sites haven't been bookmarked by many Diigo users. Still, Del.icio.us users are migrating to Diigo; one of its most popular tags is imported:del.icio.us.

Judging by common bookmark tags, such as "Web 2.0," the Diigo community is full of tech-savvy users. Still, we find it straightforward enough that a dedicated bookmarking newbie shouldn't have a problem adopting Diigo as a research companion. Diigo is great for taking notes on Web pages and using them to collaborate with other users--and since we started using Diigo, we've lost our appetite for Del.icio.us.

Diigo lets you save, import, tag, highlight, mark up and share Web pages--offering more advanced research tools than Del.icio.us.

Diigo imports bookmarks from elsewhere; tags pages by topic; lets you mark up and share Web pages; has a simple interface; toolbar and bookmarklet allow quick bookmarking; bookmarks simultaneously to rival services; searches text and comments within bookmarks.