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Diigo WebSlides Previews at Office 2.0 September 6, 2007 — 09:39 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This Diigo, the online research tool for business solutions, is previewing a new browser-based player at the Office 2.0 Conference today. This patent-pending player from Diigo, called WebSlides, lets you create a slide show with web pages. From a collection of bookmarks, you can indicate which web pages you’d like to include for your slide show, or just insert which websites you’d like to add. Use drag’n'drop technology to arrange and rearrange the order of your slides. You can leave “sticky notes” and highlights to indicate notes and further discussion around a particular area of a web page. This is useful for teams, as other team members can add to the sticky notes as well. There’s also the option of adding a voice over so your slide show can be narrated. Slide shows can be public or private, and shared with a select few. For viewers, the link to each web page displays at the bottom of the slide show, along with other viewing options for screen size, the list of slides in the show for easy navigation, and more. What this tool bar lacks is the option for viewers to grab the embed code, though creators have the option of sharing and embedding these slide shows.

I've personally had the opportunity to demo Diigo's new Webslide feature. I can personally attest that it's very easy-to-use and takes collaboration on the internet to a whole new level. Webslides allows users to showcase important data and information in a "real-time" session that does away with the traditional need to develop screen-shots pasted into a PPT presentation. Users can essentially turn any portion of internet into a PowerPoint show with a few easy clicks! Nice work Diigo!

Here are some products and services I saw at Demo that I plan to try out for my own use:

Diigo – I’m an active user of the del.icio.us social bookmarking service, but I’m frustrated by its limitations. A big one is that del.icio.us only provides a few characters with which to describe the pages I bookmark. I frequently run out of space trying to write a description. Diigo is social bookmarking for serious researchers. Users of its toolbar can highlight and annotate passages on bookmarked Web pages. People can comment on each other’s bookmarked pages and highlights. Essentially, the service creates group discussion around Web content. Anyone with the Diigo toolbar can see other users’ annotations and sites that choose to implement the Diigo protocols can provide these capabilities even to non-Diigo users. There are other innovatives features in this release, including a function that lets you create a PowerPoint-like slide show sequence using Web pages. I’m not sure I see much utility in that, but the highlighting feature alone could be enough to make me switch from del.icio.us.

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "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 markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.

Web bookmarking and research tool Diigo is announcing the launch of Diigo 3.0 today. We initially reviewed Diigo when they launched at DEMO 2007. Diigo is a bookmark tool but what I like about Diigo is their WebSlides feature. It basically makes a live PowerPoint-like annotated presentation using media from across the Web. Back in September I thought the tool was perfect for Web agencies, and I stand by this claim today. One of the new features of Diigo 3.0 is collaborative research. Team members can bring together links they find across the Web for comments and annotation. There is tagging and sticky notes that the team can participate in to make the presentation stronger. The other major update is the addition of more social components. If you install the Diigo toolbar, as you browse the Web, you can see what others think of the page including comments, who bookmarked the page and what other similar sites and pages they have bookmarked. It's all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.