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Special preview: DEMOfall '07 highlights A new crop of startups take the stage to pitch their wares, and as usual, the accent is on Web 2.0 and collaboration

Access to and the sharing of information is this year's theme with companies demonstrating tools for team collaboration, tracking online information, information filtering, and a technology that is harder to explain than use: Turning the Web in a participatory medium for bookmarking, clipping, and discussion sharing. Diigo is both the name of the product and the company that turns a Web site into a "participatory" site, according to Wade Ren, CEO and co-founder. "Diigo doesn't need enterprise adoption to work, but the more people who do adopt it, the better it is," says Ren. Diigo allows users to highlight portions of a Web site and add comments, using the design concept of a sticky note or a cartoon bubble. The note is persistent, so next time the user opens the site, the note will be there. The tool is a browser plug-in that can be downloaded and placed in the IE or Firefox tool bar. While wikis like Wikipedia make sets of pages writable and editable, Diigo makes the entire Web a writable media, according to Ren.

A noticeable trend at Demo, according to Shipley, will be the move of enterprise class tools to the small-to-medium business class space. The conference will feature six new applications focused on collaboration that can be accessed and used by individuals without requiring the involvement of IT departments. Diigo is going to be previewing upcoming features to its Web collaboration service, which lets you meet online, highlight, clip and annotate Web pages with sticky notes and make slideshows out of the Web pages you visit. "We're adding social components that connect people with knowledge and knowledge to people," Maggie Tsai, vice president of marketing at Diigo, told . RSS feeds and tags can be converted into a Diigo Web slide and the service will let you search for people with similar interests based on their Web site collections. Web slides and online discussion groups can be public, limited to a specific group or totally private based on user preference.

(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.

webslides from diigo - slideshows of bookmarked pages September 7th, 2007 · No Comments Webslides is a useful add-on feature from what I already consider to be the premier social bookmarking device on the web - diigo. This feaure allows you to create a slide show from your bookmarks so they become more interesting and you can highlight what you want. This lets you convey a series of points quickly and gives rise to an overall effect. Kind of like the difference between a picture and a group of pictures that run together to make a short movie. Each frame is meaningful, but in the aggregate they gain much, much more meaning and impact. Okay, enough about that. Just try it and see if you agree.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with diigo, it’s a collaborative bookmarking tool available for free on the web. It fits in and becomes part of your browser so you can capture information of any kind (words, audio, video, URLs, etc.) while browsing, doing research, etc. So far I’ve just described bookmarking, which we’ve all been doing that since Internet Explorer and Netscape were duking it out in 1995. So what’s the difference? The twist is diigo (like many competing services such as del.icio.us, furl, spurl, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and others) makes your bookmarks available to all other users of the service, while doing the same for you. Instant sharing. Of course you can also restrict your bookmarks to a particular group or keep them to yourself. But where’s the fun in that?

I maintain a few groups on diigo myself on topics such as legal technology, real property law, the current mortgage meltdown, divorce, immigration … you get the idea. You can check out my diigo groups and join them yourself (yes, I’m encouraging you to do so) by going to http://groups.diigo.com/. As always, thank you for your support.

Diigo un del.icio.us puissance dix ! Si vous connaissez del.icio.us, vous auriez tout intérêt à essayer Diigo. Ces deux services Web ont comme base les signets sociaux. Par contre Diigo va beaucoup plus loin, en permettant entre autres la création de notes sur vos signets, d’annoter des pages Web, de collaborer en échangeant des commentaires à même les signets.

Take your time to read the opening to the story below. Your job is to respond in two ways. 1 - Add a sticky note, using the Diigo toolbar, under your picture or name and  explain how you feel about this opening. 2 - Highlight some text and comment on part of the opening you enjoyed or want to talk about. Add you initials to your comments.

On Reflection  This activity was easy to set up - it is basically a page of text, the key thing is to have the Diigo toolbar (and class account) ready to roll. It can be done with a whole class using a computer suite for a literacy lesson, different children looking at different texts. The texts could also be in the public domain and they do not need to be narrative even. If you are looking at persuasive text why not look at the Alton Towers site and get the children to add Sticky Notes with their comments about how persuasive the site is. It could also be extended beyond popular fiction to include peer reviewing of children’s work they have published. (Lots to explore here I think) We worked between classes separated by a corridor but there is no reason why schools from anywhere could collaborate in response to a story or text. Given the right preparation and equipment I think this is a most manageable activity within a literacy independent session. My children had looked at Sticky Notes before but never added them independently - they catch on very fast and coped without any problems. Diigo with its “Highlight and Comment” tool can easily become a very useful online text annotation / response tool and I think I will keep using it.

I am pleased to welcome Diigo into my toolkit on a permanent contract :) all these ideas have been simmering for a while now and it is excellent to have the opportunity to see the children engaging and responding to text in this unique way.

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.

Diigo v3 places more emphasis on the social aspect of social bookmarking through merging ideas from several different sites together. For example, it takes annotating from Clipmarks, bookmarking from del.icio.us and a facility which suggests websites you may like based on your annotations from StumbleUpon.

Diigo v3 has some unique features which I like. When you are on websites, you can view what other users have highlighted and annotated which is useful for group projects where collaboration is necessary. You can also join groups and communities and send private messages to other users. Another interesting feature is WebSlides which lets you view your bookmarks as a slideshow which is useful if you can’t always remember the name of the site but you can remember the way it looks!

But when it comes to online research and collaboration, are the usual social bookmarking services really the best possible tool for organizing that flood of online information? If you've bookmarked the same website several times over, or misplaced an important bookmark among a hundred others in your list that share the same tag, the limitations of tagging as an organization tool will be clear. And if you're like me, sometime you'll find a certain bookmark easily enough, only to discover that you can't remember precisely which single sentence it was that made you bookmark the page in the first place!

Diigo.com takes social bookmarking to a new level of usefulness.

For research and writing collaboration, in particular, I'm finding all of this a real time-saver.  Normally, for example, you might point your colleague to a social-bookmarked page you'd like them to read — but then you'll often need to take the time to explain its significance in a separate phone call, chat message or email.

This is the most versatile social bookmarking tool! Why is Diigo our social bookmarking service of choice? It provides so many other useful features in addition to saving and sharing bookmarks! Diigo enables you to forward your saved sites to others, enhancing collaboration. It's also a great tool for researching because it allows you to highlight text and add sticky notes to any web page. Diigo provides another tool for collaboration by allowing the creation of user groups and discussion forums. Diigo also interacts with Delicious and other bookmarking tools through the use of the Add Elsewhere button. Web pages can be linked together, in a webquest style, through the use of the webslides feature.

Web bookmarking and research tool Diigo is announcing the launch of Diigo 3.0 today. We initially reviewed Diigo when they launched at DEMO 2007. Diigo is a bookmark tool but what I like about Diigo is their WebSlides feature. It basically makes a live PowerPoint-like annotated presentation using media from across the Web. Back in September I thought the tool was perfect for Web agencies, and I stand by this claim today. One of the new features of Diigo 3.0 is collaborative research. Team members can bring together links they find across the Web for comments and annotation. There is tagging and sticky notes that the team can participate in to make the presentation stronger. The other major update is the addition of more social components. If you install the Diigo toolbar, as you browse the Web, you can see what others think of the page including comments, who bookmarked the page and what other similar sites and pages they have bookmarked. It's all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.

In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked: “Is it really that easy?” “It sure is.” I replied.

Students Use Social Bookmarking Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”