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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.

(I-Newswire) - OFFICE 2.0, SAN FRANCISCO-- Sept. 6, 2007 – Diigo, www.diigo.com, is previewing WebSlidesSM, a browser-based player that displays any list of URLs complete with integrated annotations, sticky notes, and highlights as an interactive slideshow.  Diigo is also demonstrating WebSlides during the official Demo tracks during Office 2.0 conference.  More information on the demonstration schedule here: http://www.o2con.com/docs/DOC-1017. Diigo's patent-pending WebSlides, available at http://slides.diigo.com, enables a new way to easily create and share unique presentations based on web content and user annotations. To experience WebSlides, users simply collect and organize any set of links into a list, and add background music or voice narration.  By clicking "Play," the list transforms into a slideshow bringing Web pages and user comments to life. The player can then be sent to friends and colleagues and also posted on Websites and blogs. Viewers of the slideshow can interact on the slides through highlights and sticky notes directly on each page, without installing any software. This incredibly easy-to-use web-based software has many potential applications such as: - Create a guided tour for any website- Show a list of houses to real estate clients- Review a list of job candidates found online- Bundle important course resources for students- Provide a quick briefing, or a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject- Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers Diigo is a powerful, yet incredibly simple to use research tool that allows people to annotate, bookmark, highlight, save, and clip Web content that matters to them, for future reference or to share with others. They can also comment and add sticky notes directly on each web page, which are viewable by other Diigo users when visiting the same pages. About DiigoDiigo provides a suite of online research and collaborative research tool for individuals and small to medium-sized work groups. Diigo enables seamless bookmarking, tagging, highlighting, clipping, sharing, annotating, and searching of information to deliver a new level of productivity for knowledge workers. Diigo Groups also offer a simple and cost-effective platform for collaborative research. Upcoming releases will transform Diigo's powerful social bookmarking, social annotation and social networking suite into the next-generation knowledge management platform for large enterprises, through both hosted and appliance-based solutions. Diigo is privately held, and is based in Reno, NV.

It reminded me of the the review tools in Microsoft Word which I've used a few times with students - someone sends me a Word document and I add comments and suggested edits. The review tools can track changes I make as well as highlighting sections and adding notes in the margin. I can then send the annotated Word document back to the author and a conversation grows around the original document and our comments. When I first started using this feature of Word, I thought it would be great if you could do that with web pages. Imagine being able to get a class of students to collaborate on a web page: to highlighting sections, share their understanding, ask questions and add extra information. With diigo, that's exactly what you could do.Add to that online social bookmarking (which can be linked to other bookmarking services such as del.icio.us), the ability to highlight any text on a page and search for it on a range of search services using a pop-up menu, to blog about a page and link non-diigo users to your annotations on that page (this blog posted was created using the diigo Blog this tool) and a host of other features ...and you have a stunningly valuable educational tool.

I have also found Diigo to be quite an exciting tool and this year my year group is in a better position to use it. I structured it into an independent activity during a literacy hour with my Year 5 children. Using Diigo I annotated a set of written instructions with comprehension style questions and the children answered them in their jotters. The children were accessing the site using a class set of laptops. I wanted them to respond someway online but took a simpler step to begin with to test the concept. It worked very well and the children were well motivated and on task - they managed well with the new tool and took it in their stride.

The Good: The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers. Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation. The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad: A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion: Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.