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Diigo: the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife July 24th, 2006 Just as PC World predicted, the bookmarking / social annotation powerhouse known as Diigo announced their public launch today. While others have been quick to launch a legion of bookmarking sites that are all nearly identical to one another, Diigo’s developers have taken the time necessary to produce the most substantive collection of annotation, blogging, and research tools available under one roof. Those who think that Diigo is “just another” bookmarking site are in for a big surprise when they start to explore the real capabilities of this little beast. When I first mentioned Diigo back in February, I stated that my favorite feature was the ability to bookmark across multiple platforms (such as Binklist, Furl, RawSugar, etc.) but what I didn’t realize is that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. “What are these great features?” you’re asking. Let’s take a look at some of them. First of all, the key to unlocking the secret world of Diigo is the toolbar. This tiny piece of software allows the whole of the internet to become an interactive work station. While the toolbar contains the standard bookmarking and search features you would expect, it also allows you to use the real gem of this suite: the Content Selection Menu. The Content Selection Menu is an innocent-looking little drop down menu that appears whenever you highlight some text (this feature can be turned on or off via the options menu on the toolbar.) The menu contains three categories of sub-menus: Diigo, Search, and Copy.

The Diigo sub-menu allows you to highlight selected text or to blog the text with Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, or Typepad. The highlight can be set to either public or private visibility. The private highlighting is particularly useful if you’re doing any sort of research that involves keeping track of bits of information from all over the web. The public highlighting is great for annotating web pages with “sticky notes” that other Diigo users can see when hovering over the highlighted text. One more important feature here is the ability to forward the web page without having to go through the trouble of composing an email to do it. So in one fell swoop you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, and forward without ever having to leave the web page. (One minor correction: the highlighting does not become publicly visible unless a public Sticky Note has been attached.) In the Search sub-menu you will find the ability to search your selected text across a potentially infinite number of search engines and online resources. The stock search menu comes loaded with about ten categories, each containing multiple resources. Whether you want to search a standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo, a blogging resource such as Technorati, News, Shopping, Music, Bookmarking sites, they’re all there, and much more. In addition, the search menu is fully cusomizable. Don’t need a certain category? No problem, just delete it. Want to add you own category? That’s no problem either. You can add, remove, and rearrange ’til your heart’s content. The Copy menu is short and sweet. And I do mean sweet! As much as I love all of the other features Diigo has to offer, this is quite possibly the one “must have” feature that seals the deal for me. This sub-menu has only two offerings: Without format, and With format. Anyone who has needed to cut & paste text from a web site into a blog entry, email, or word processing document should know the frustration of having to unformat the text in order to make it usable in your document. I had gotten to the point of just keeping Notepad open in order to quickly (and I use that term very loosely) unformat text before pasting it into my documents. Now with a single click I can strip the text of its formatting, making it ready to insert into the document of my choice. Like I said…sweet! I could go on and on about the wonders of Diigo, but you really aren’t going to gain a full appreciation for it until you give it try yourself. If all of these features (and I didn’t even cover them all) seem a little overwhelming, don’t worry. There is an extensive help section to guide you through. Why wait for Web 2.0 to come to your favorite sites when you can carry this cutting-edge tool wherever you go? Posted by Reginald Freeman

Hands-on Diigo: bookmarking evolved By Rafe Needleman – August 1, 2006,

It took me a while to grok Diigo, though. There's a lot going on here, and like a Swiss Army Knife, there are blades that new users will find confusing. What's a customizable search bar doing here? And why does Diigo act so much like a social bookmarking tool--do we really need another one of these?

but we've evolved since then--what people used to call "graffiti" we now call "interactivity" and "community."

Diigo: Bookmarking evolved August 1, 2006 6:39 PM PDT There's yet another new bookmarking utility live now: Diigo. This one is different. In addition to letting you bookmark pages and share those bookmarks with others, it also lets you highlight parts of pages (text or images), and store those highlight not just in your Diigo account but on the Web pages themselves (if you have the plug-in). You can also attach post-it-like notes to your highlights on Web pages, and they can be private or shared. Old-timers may recollect one of the first Web annotation services, ThirdVoice. That tool also let you mark up any Web page you visited, so that other ThirdVoice users could see what everybody had to say. The service died in a firestorm of controversy, but we've evolved since then -- what people used to call graffiti we now call interactivity and community. The annotation capability sets Diigo apart from Del.icio.us and makes it a more granular data gathering tool, like ClipMarks. Diigo lets you take your clips and do useful things with them: You can publish them all as a Web page, or directly to a blog, or send them in emails. With the Diigo toolbar installed, you can also easily mark parts of any Web page and forward them directly via email. It's a handy and universal "send this article" function, and the highlighting tool makes it much easier to add context. It took me a while to grok Diigo, though. There's a lot going on here, and like a Swiss Army knife, there are blades that new users will find confusing. What's a customizable search bar doing here? And why does Diigo act so much like a social bookmarking tool -- do we really need another one of these? Diigo has very useful annotation and organizational features, though, and if want good way to mark up the Web for personal use or a fast way to send clips to people you know, it's worth checking out. See also JetEye. There's also a nice review of Diigo on SolutionWatch. Posted by Rafe Needleman