Group items tagged

There are tons of social bookmarking sites out there and then there is Diigo. Unlike the other social bookmarking del.licio.us wannbie, I actually like Diigo.

If you are like me, someone who forgets why he bookmark a site the next day, you will find this feature handy. If I look back on my del.licio.us page, I can’t remember why I bookmarked half of the site on it. This I think is going to be really useful for collage student, when they are researching something on the web. They could put annotation on sites they found and share then with their other buddies in Diigo. Having Diigo lets you access another world of the web. You will see public highlights of sites by other Diigo users. There are 3 view modes, all (view all highlights and stickies), private (view only your highlights or stickies) and disable (no view of any highlights or stickies). Same like other social bookmarking services out there, you can subscribe / watch what other people are bookmarking. In Diigo, you can subscribe to a person or a tag and there is this mail looking icon on the Diigo toolbar in your Firefox that will show new bookmarked sites either by someone or some tag you subscribed to.

Now I can use this new tool without really forgetting to bookmark the same links to my old bookmarking site as well. For my I do them at Del.icio.us and my bookmarks will be registered there while I am using Diigo. So if you want to give this service a try without loosing anything, this is the way to go. Configuration is simple as well!

Social Annotation I have just read about a company currently in private beta called Diigo, which is in the business of social annotation (SA). Apparently SA is a superset of social bookmarking or tagging, which is of course the piece de resistance of ‘Web 2.0′. The question is can SA be an even better route to getting aquired by MAGY? Don’t quite me on ‘MAGY’ though since I am not sure what order those names should go in… I had been thinking about SA for some time but did not have the time / resources to get anything together for public showing - but this might be a good reason to do so. Of course given my record with getting code up on my blog I won’t have a sample till next year this time. Anyhow, the possiblities for SA are much more attractive than social bookmarking in my mind. With social annotations (at least what I consider it to be) I can surf to any web page and place tagged sticky notes (private or public) in a browser agnostic fashion that will contain my comments and refer to a certain block in the web page DOM. Then I can go to some central place to view / oranize my comments and can also subscribe to RSS of other people’s comments on those pages or from particular people.

The main problem that I have with Diigo (from the looks of their Flash demo) is that I need to install their toolbar - yuck!

The useful part of these systems for end users is that they can tag particular bits of content on a page and find exactly what they were referring to with a tag. Then if you combine this idea with microformats and the Semantic Web you might really be cooking with something combustible like methane.