Group items tagged

I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done.

2. Sidebar- The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser. 3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items. 4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar. 5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity. 6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.

Somehow, I find myself trusting Diigo more than Facebook, although you can connect to Facebook via Diigo. What's also present is the potential for "Diigo-spam." Ok, I've spammed everyone in my addressbook. I can't remember the last time I did it, but I hope that if you received an email via Diigo from me, you'll jump in and give this a try. If you don't want to, hit delete. Do I think Diigo is that powerful a tool? Well, yes. It offers something Delicious doesn't--groups, and a base of operations that interfaces with other tools. If I could share information using Diigo, ohmygosh, one ring to rule them all. One of the other aspects of Diigo I liked was that the Diigo crew is hopping to improve things. Importing bookmarks from Delicious API wasn't working well (i had to try 3-4 times), so they came up with an alternative way to accomplish the import. Dean Shareski complained about the interface, and they re-did the user interface. There's also talk of creating an education (student) friendly Diigo....

Easy group subscription - I wish there was a URL I could share with people. They click on it, and bam, if they have a Diigo account, they're subscribed. If they lack an account, it walks them through the process then makes sure to hook them up with the group. I just don't see how to do it easily now.

Everywhere I turn, people are joining Diigo, forsaking the simplicity of Delicious for the social nature of Diigo, which offers a variety of ways to connect with others--highlight text, then save it to your bookmarks, post to your blog, send it out as a tweet, and share it with a group of like-minded educators. The power of the network...comes alive in a way that removes the onus of commercialism so prevalent in Facebook.