Group items tagged

Annotation - Content Highlighting and Notes The key feature of Diigo is annotation. Users can bookmark a page and highlight text and images on the page to take note of. Highlights on a page by the user will then save and appear as a blue dashed underline whenever they visit the site again. Hovering over a highlight will bring up a menu where the user can optionally add a note to the highlight and make the note private or public. Highlighted text with notes attached to them will appear as a solid underline in blue. Also, if you browse to a site that other Diigo users have highlighted or added notes to, you will see their highlights on the page (if saved publicly) colored in orange. Being able to bookmark and annotate a page is very helpful. In terms of research, you can bookmark and annotate all the sites related to the topic you are researching. When your done getting all the information you need, select all the bookmarks in the “My Bookmarks” area and select in the top right drop down, “Extract highlights.” This will then grab all your notes from all the sources you’ve saved and display them on a clean page for you to look over and print. This is a great tool for bloggers as well. Gather up all your sources for a post your working on, add your notes, and when ready, select all the bookmarks and blog about it using Diigo’s built in blogging tool (explained below). Blogging I personally prefer blogging straight through my WordPress installation, but for those of you that want to take notes, gather sources, and easily publish a post to your blog, Diigo may be your solution. Diigo allows you to add multiple blogs to your account, verify them, and easily publish a post, however you may only publish and cannot manage old entries. What I like is that while you browse the web and you come across a site talking about a specific topic you want to expand on, you can right click and select, “Blog This,” which will then direct you to the blogging area where you can write your post along with that site being your source. The other method is by simply going to your bookmarks section and selecting a bookmark, or multiple bookmarks, that you want to write about and then selecting the “Blog This” option from the top right drop down menu. All the sources, highlighted text, and notes will be included in the post document, which you can easily remove if needed, ready for you to write. It’s not an entire blogging platform, just a simple publishing tool that works. Browser Toolbar and Bookmarklet The Diigo toolbar, available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, brings most of Diigo’s features right to your browser. The toolbar allows you to easily bookmark websites, highlight and note pages, search documents for keywords, search terms in a page using your favorite search engine, and it even brings all bookmarks right to the toolbar. The toolbar also is what makes it possible for you to see highlighted text and notes that you and other users have made on websites you visit. Bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking the Diigo button and filling in the tags and highlighting just involves you highlighting the text you want to save. One of my favorite features is the “QuickD” button (not in the above screenshot) that I recently came across. The QuickD button allows you to save a bookmark to Diigo with one click without needing the original Diigo popup to appear and adds a default tag to it (you may also fill in tags in the search box of the toolbar to tag it) so you can just click and go. What if you don’t want to install an extension to your browser? That’s fine because Diigo also provides it’s user with Diigolet, a browser bookmarklet that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate any website as well as view annotations on pages left by other Diigo users.

One of the things I’ve seen other people rave about is the ability to have “private” objects on diigo. So an annotation, bookmark, comment etc can be hidden from other users, something that can only currently be done in del.icio.us with a hack. Personally I think this is neither here nor there, while its nice to have the option (when I first started using del.icio.us I did feel I was being forced into the whole social aspect of it rather than finding my own way) it does remove from some of the community aspects. Of course this is an obvious attempt to move diigo into local (browser) bookmark territory as opposed to what del.icio.us is usually used for, which tends to be more for points of interest. There are sites I have bookmarked, such as my bank, that I would never add to del.icio.us, I would be more tempted to add it as a private bookmark to diigo (although I haven’t).

The bookmarklet is in fact very advanced, you fire it up and a small toolbar appears at the top of your browser window. One option allows you to bookmark the page and there are links to your diigo bookmarks and subscriptions. Theres also a “highlight” option that only becomes active when you have some text highlighted. Generally the bookmarklet works well, you can hide it from your screen and call it back by moving your mouse to the left of the browser and it generally copes well.

To sum up, I liked the diigo service. Its attempt to augment basic webpages with advanced features is admirable. Currently theres a sense of community lacking which may be down to the fact that it is currently a closed beta, it may also be down to the lack of a “popular” page be it overall or by tag, both would be good. There are also a lot of features that are in the pipeline and alot of features that I didn’t get a chance to test out, features like “Blog This”