Group items tagged

In my early days of Living in the Clouds, I was using Delicious as my cloud based bookmarking tool. It was my favorite Web 2.0 era tool. I loved it so much that I refused to look at any other social bookmarking apps. When I started blogging here at Cloud Avenue, Zoli recommended us to use another bookmarking site called Diigo for our research purposes. I agreed to use this app very reluctantly and I never looked back since then. Diigo is not just a social bookmarking site but it is also a very good research tool including options to highlight, annotate, comment, share, etc.. This tool has changed the way I do research on the web with its powerful set of features. In fact, I have stopped using Delicious completely. This is much more powerful than Delicious in my quest to organize my information in the clouds.

Pros: Highlight and Annotation. This is a powerful feature for anyone who is using Diigo for research purposes. The best part of this is the finer privacy control for annotation. One can keep it private or share with a group or make it public. Ability to create groups to share with others interested in a particular area or lists to organize information better for yourself. Ability to send to friends who are not members of Diigo through email. Ability to expand/collapse highlights and annotations in your Diigo bookmarks page. Powerful toolbar Ability to extract all the annotation in a particular page. Comes handy while researching on any topic. Here, the network effects can make this feature more powerful.

Cons: Lack of browser button that could hide/unhide the Diigo toolbar similar to Stumbleupon toolbar. This will come handy for those with smaller monitors/netbooks to use the space occupied by the toolbar to see the webpage.

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again

This innovation is a browser based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes and highlights in an interactive slideshow. With this cool tool users can record and narrate tracks as well as add background music to make compelling shows - and somewhat more. WebSlides is being presented at the Office 2.0 Conference as I write this, so we wanted you to have a look at this simple, innovative and useful tool as well.  

Web 2.0 has to a large extent been about new ways of organizing and manipulating data. This is particularly true of bookmarks and other links. Innovative developments like Second Brain, Particls and others have pushed the envelope in creating useful and fascinating ways for organizing all types of links and data. Well, testing this little tool makes me wonder why someone did not think of this before (I - know just comment and tell us about your service too). WebSlides is like StumbleUpon in motion actually. It does not yet have the "resident" features of SU, but WebSlide creations saved or submitted to other services will exhibit a similar feel. So just when we thought StumbleUpon and a host of others had done everything with pages - along comes WebSlides. Here is a short list of things users might do with this service. Create guided tours of websites Display a list of houses or other products to clients Bundle education resources or research data Make shows of favorite places when visiting or traveling Create briefings or tutorials and tours on virtually any subject Present a whole series of news stories on a topic to digg or del.icio.us and others for scrutiny Interactively submit "collections" of stories and data