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Why We Like Diigo

use the web to research

as easily as if I were using a yellow highlighter and a red pen

mark up web pages

no longer need to copy

all digitally facilitated with the Diigo social bookmarking and annotating tool

shifted the way I read the world wide web

much more active

in the same way I use a paper textbook

scribble in the margins

"dog-ear" important pages

individually or collaboratively

highlight and comment as I go, building a path

snippets that I want to remember

return to what is important

information-processing is heightened

a greater level of usefulness

not tied to any one computer

private or public sticky notes

a powerful collaborative tool

message boards

automated email summaries

extract highlighted text from a set of web pages

create a personalized learning environment for any topic

"Extract Annotations"

replicating what I used to do on paper

all of those highlighted passages in one place

Diigo saves me a lot of this time

access many more sources of information

my ability to scan, organize, and absorb multiple sources of information is greatly increased

also see what others have highlighted or commented

when I search on Diigo the results are based on what my colleagues in the field have identified as important and relevant

Diigo is a tool that fosters collaboration and resource sharing

benefit from others' insight

faculty committees use Diigo

everyone on the committee has access to a growing set of shared links

such as ways we can build a more sustainable culture

helps to identify important segments

the more of an individual’s thoughts they include via the commenting tools, the better

thoughtful comments tied to specific portions of the text are more illuminating

localized comments

fruitful conversations

create your own groups for any purpose

feedback of other group members

discover new tools and content

When I was ready to collect

professional development interests of each teacher

exciting for me and my students

metacognition (thinking about thinking)

I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements

I had such a fun time

assess the students' work

really cool

like I was reading the stories along with each of them

kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text

showed their thinking

asking questions, reflecting, and analyzing the text by inserting these as comments

a powerful tool for supporting and scaffolding metacognition

deepens my thinking about the content

see how my colleagues have responded

my Diigo network

Diigo also stores a "cached" version of each web page you visit

the best tool is one that meets all of our needs all of the time. We believe that Diigo is this tool.

Diigo can also be set to update other networks

Diigo is a powerful tool that is literally changing the way that we look at the web. It has gotten me excited about bookmarking again.

I subscribe to several "groups" on Diigo

Several people have collaboratively worked on this article

Demetri Orlando

Michèle Drechsler

Sarah Hanawald

Beth Ritter-Guth

The fundamental problems of annotation, regarding construction and usability - remain, even though the web infrastructure has opened up.

The memex concept of “trails” doesn’t seem to be captured by many of the current systems (except perhaps TrailFire and ShiftSpace? ) I think the wiki article on memex covers the differences: http://en.wikip....org/wiki/Memex

We could be wrong about that, perhaps Diigo or some evolved form of Google Notebook will be the One True Meta-web the market selects. But we should at least stop to consider what it means to have our online culture be privately controlled (or pseudo-publicly controlled; ICANN, etc.).

Search has led us astray. A better solution may well come from the way we filter information in real life (where we can’t search cause its not free, there’s no google for the real world). We start locally with things we trust and bring in sources local to those. I trust the NYT and my friends, and find new things to trust from there. When I want to find out something, THAT’s the set I want to search.

Stickis.com brings to YOU information from YOUR socially proximate and trusted sources. Wherever you browse the web, it tells you what your personally selected Crowd of friends, bloggers etc have said.

Blogrovr.com does this for blogs. Tell Rovr what blogs you like and wherever you browse on the web, rovr tells you what they’ve said about the page you’re on.

Wade Ren April 11th, 2007 at 6:04 pm Re: Meer on Diigo - “90% of those features (except annotation) are rarely used by a regular web surfer. Indeed, web annotation itself is not for 90% of the users, and is likely to be adopted only by the minority of the web users who consume information diligently. After all, everyone knows that having a pen and a highlighter while you read is really helpful for digesting and retaining information — but how many actually do it? For the minority of the users that do make use of web annotation, our user feedback tells us Diigo’s other features are quite appreciated. In addition, the Diigo plug-in is completely customizable, allowing users to only keep the features they want

For this reason, we are positioning JumpKnowledge as more of a personal annotation tool and not a social annotation tool. This allows us to focus JKN and make it easy as possible to use for non-technical creators and readers.

This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic.

Wade Ren April 11th, 2007 at 11:54 am Nick, Thanks for covering the web annotation area and mentioning Diigo here. Since the Techcrunch review last August, we have been developing lots of new features and we hope we can give you a demo soon. As a sort of quick showcase of Diigo, click this link to see some annotations on this post http://srl.diigo.com/11xq — no plug-in is needed and you can be using any of the major browsers (firefox, ie, opera, safari) .

Stickis Subscribe to only the annotations you want Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin.

We’re looking forward to achieve a point where we not necessarily compete but can share resources and standards and work together to finally make this great potential for a metaweb to come true.

eyalnow April 18th, 2007 at 9:02 am I discovered Diigo two months ago, became an avid user and a self-proclaimed product evangelist, and recently started working for the company. Diigo for me is the knowledge-management solution I was looking for. What sets diigo apart is that it handles *Knowledge*, rather than mere links. It is the ONLY solution that lets me *permanently* highlight and annotate specific text on a webpage, which is then saved to my diigo profile. Diigo complements the mental process in which a sentence “jumps” at you, and you make a mental note about it. By highlighting the sections I deem important, I better understand and remember what I read. I believe there is scientific proof for this. As time goes by, I’m building a repository of all the important Knowledge I find on the net, which I can easily manage, tag, retrieve and aggregate. Regarding the ’social’ aspect: Diigo provides me immediate personal benefits, and I can then share this knowledge with others of my choosing, and follow what other individuals or groups are finding on the net. Not just the pages(links) they are browsing, but the actual sections that they deem important, and their reactions to it. I think that Diigo is not only for ‘researchers’. Most of us conduct some sort of research whenever we read a news article, shop for an appliance, view photos or videos, or read a blogpost. Although I appreciate the other services, and might occasionally use some of them, I find that Diigo already incorporates and combines MOST of their important features, in a way that is more robust and scalable. Diigo specifically addresses the issue that was mentioned in the introduction of this tech-crunch comparison - mark up the web and make annotations on webpages.

I diigo! Do you diigo?

I diigo! Do you diigo?

11. Oliver Schwenke  |  January 17th, 2007 at 1:28 am I have to agree with Ramon and the other Diigo users who left a comment here. In my opinion, nothing comes close to Diigo feature-wise.

3. Keith Manning  |  January 17th, 2007 at 7:57 am My comment is mostly for serious business use — mostly saving and sharing research. Diigo is already a great personal tool. I have tried several, and found that Onfolio was the best for my needs (until it was bought by the Evil Empire and emasculated). However, I am already finding Diigo to be better than Onfolio was at its best. I am anxiously awaiting the groups feature of Diigo. If it works as advertised, it will make Diigo a killer application for my company. It is already our personal research bookmarker. With groups, it will become a workgroup bookmarker, with the ability to collaborate in creating a bookmark set for each project. It promises to also give us flexible group definitions to support multiple, overlapping workgroups. Since our usage is commercial, we also want privacy. The “social” nature of some sites can be a positive disadvantage for users like ours. We would also prefer a paid service; I trust a service that has a fee-based business model more than I trust a supplier that is making money by indirect means. Also, I abhor intrusive advertising and cross linking. Having sung the praises of Diigo for our serious business application, I should add that we also use it for personal, more trivial purposes. Like sharing gift ideas, or discussing new gadgets. We used to use a private (TypePad) group blog for this, but since getting Diigo, the blog has fallen into disuse, and we tend to Diigo-annotated pages instead — note that Diigo has now become a transitive verb, like Tivo. -Keith

14. Ismael Ghalimi  |  January 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm Ramon, Oliver, Keith, Reading through your comments, it seems to me that Diigo is getting close to becoming a full fledged enterprise bookmarking tool in its own right. That’s pretty good news to me, for I hate having only one player in any category I cover. Let’s see how it compares to Connectbeam and the upcoming Cogenz down the road. Best regards -Ismael

Best Online Bookmarking Application Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote: Note: if you cannot see the voting form, please follow this link.

Then I found Diigo, and suddenly Delicious didn’t look so good anymore. Diigo is another social bookmarking service (and one we’ve covered before), offering all of Delicious’ relevant features and much more. I left Delicious, and haven’t ever looked back. There are a lot of things I love about Diigo, but there are seven features that sold me on using Diigo for all my bookmarking needs. These are all in addition to the features I deem non-negotiable for social bookmarking sites- tagging, Firefox extensions, looking at popular bookmarks, etc.

1. Highlighting

2. Saving Pages is Easier Than Ever, Regardless of Browser

If you’re using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Flock, the Diigo toolbar has all the features you could want - bookmark, search, highlight, and organize all your Web pages right from the toolbar. If you’re not into those browsers, though there’s a great bookmarklet that lets you do most of that with any browser. I use Chrome, and all the functionality I need is built right into the bookmarklet. Delicious becomes more difficult to use outside of Firefox (there are bookmarklets, but they pale in comparison), and Diigo keeps on working fine.

3. Functional Commenting and Real Conversations

This is one of my favorite features of Diigo - when you’re reading a page, you can make comments right on the page, that show up as speech bubbles. If another Diigo user comes across the page, they’ll be able to see your comment. You can see (in the Firefox sidebar) who’s reading a page you’re on, who’s talking about it, and a real conversation can happen - unlike in Delicious, when all you can see is someone’s bookmarks.

4. Send Bookmarks to Facebook or Twitter with one click

With one click, you can send a Diigo bookmark to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog. It truly takes one click, from “Send” to the service you want to use. If you want to send bookmarks to Facebook, you’ll have to install the Diigo Facebook app. You can also have Diigo create a daily digest of your latest bookmarks and send it to your blog, which I’d debate the usefulness of, but the functionality is there. Being able to bookmark a site on Twitter in particular straight from Diigo is big for me, and makes Twitter easier and quicker to use.

5. Sites Help You Find Deeper Cuts

When you bookmark a page with Diigo, it bookmarks more than just the link (like those other sites). It bookmarks the entire page you were on, which has two great implications. First, it means you can preview sites within the Diigo page. You can view your bookmarked page, without ever leaving Diigo. It also means that you can search the full text of pages you bookmark.

Your bookmarks live in Diigo, so if a site goes down or is unavailable, you can still find it in Diigo, as well as search and view it. Diigo’s become a social-bookmarking machine, and I left Delicious and never looked back. If you want to make the switch, you can import your bookmarks from most other services- making the switch is so easy, there’s no reason not to! Diigo’s the new gold standard in social bookmarks. Do you use social bookmarking services? Which one? What are the killer features that make you use the one you’ve got?

I’m a big YouTube fan, but there are way more videos than I can possibly figure out. With “Sites“, you’re able to go through a particular site (including MakeUseOf) and find out what other people are bookmarking and reading about. You can create a watchlist, and whenever someone bookmarks a page from that site, you see it. It’s a great way to find popular and cool stuff in big, content-full sites that you might not notice otherwise.

6. Simultaneously bookmark things to Diigo and Elsewhere - even Delicious! If you have a Ma.gnolia, Delicious, or Simpy account that you want to hold on to for posterity, you can set up Diigo to simultaneously bookmark pages to Diigo and to your other service, using the “Save Elsewhere” feature. I like this because it means you can use the vastly superior Diigo, but for all four different services. Just enter your account info, and you can start bookmarking all over the Web, with one click!

7. Bookmark and Search Entire Web Pages

I seem to always bookmark a page, and then come back to it later and forget what it was that I cared about on the page

No more searching through the page again to find what it was you cared about.

Rival Clipmarks offers some similar annotation features.

t they’re offering a “better del.icio.us”

Diigo isn’t a terrible product, but I think it’s safe to say it’s going nowhere. Aside from the few hundred users who find the additional features useful, it’s unlikely to see any real adoption.

As I said in an email to you guys, I’m sorry for being so tactless about this - and you’re right that I didn’t give a fair run down of your features. Nonetheless, I do wonder if you might struggle to differentiate the offering in this market.

Best thing about Diigo by far is the inadvertent smiling walrus in the logo. The site’s starting a footrace that’s already over, but that walrus is seriously cute!

These services depend on volume to experience any success at all, being collective intelligence models.

If you have ever tried to use it I can assure you it is pretty painful. I am not sure if it is something personal to me, but I find their UI design very painful.

I say that review was spot on except for the line: “Diigo isn’t a terrible product”

Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares

If you’re looking for some awesome blogging and research tools in addition to everything you’d expect in a bookmarking service, then explore the depth of services that Diigo has to offer. In my opinion Diigo isn’t just a tool, it’s more akin to a household appliance.

This space is seriously crowed!

“Diigolet” (no Flock version yet)

I hate it when I read a nice blog post and at the bottom they have a “Liked this Article? Bookmark us!” section, and there are 26 entries (no kidding!).

Diigo is different, not because it can’t do what the other services do. It’s different because it puts the user’s needs first and centre, instead of using the user for information aggregation purposes.

32. the Wandering Author - July 29, 2006 What I don’t understand is why anyone should care about the opinion of a blogger who apparently posts without even knowing anything about his subject. I spend a lot of time doing research, some of it on the Internet. I have a whole, long list of somewhat nice tools I have come across. Most of them are things I might use occasionally. I would never even think of adding toolbars for most of them, or setting up a permanent tab in Firefox to keep them always available - I’d just clutter up my workspace. But that is exactly what I have done with Diigo - I installed their toolbar and I set up a permanent Firefox tab for them. Why? I can share bookmarks with others when I need to, but much more importantly, I can highlight, annotate, clip, and bookmark any Web content I choose, all in one central, convenient spot. Diigo is like a well-loved research notebook crammed with notes for current projects, past projects, possible future projects. Unlike most of the bookmarking “services”, I can go back to a page and see my own notes reminding me of the thought which prompted me to bookmark it. There is nothing else that even approaches it on the Web, or if there is, I haven’t heard of it. The only other social bookmarking service I consider of any real use is eSnips, which allows me to upload files for sharing with a group of my choice. Which is an entirely different feature. But, I could more easily imagine Diigo adding that functionality to their existing site than I could imagine eSnips catching up to Diigo. Personally, I hope both eSnips and Diigo survive, but if only one of them is to be a success, my vote is firmly with Diigo. As for all the other, popular social bookmarking sites out there - yes, it was a somewhat interesting idea, but they have already been left in the dust by Diigo. Calling Diigo “just another” site like the others is as absurd as it would be to label the first interstellar spaceship “just another aircraft”. Yes, I can think of features or tweaks I wish Diigo would add. But they’re just starting out. I’m sure the first interstellar spacecraft will need a few refits, too. But that’s no reason to suggest we might as well all stay on Earth and ignore the rest of the Universe. Diigo opens up a much wider universe on the Web to me, and to many others. To all of you who don’t care - enjoy being stranded in your little backwater pond as it stagnates - I will be out surfing the whole wide ocean of data out there. And I won’t waste any time worrying about you and your plight; after all, you brought it on yourselves by your apathy.

The question is: does anybody care?