Group items tagged

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.

Diigo has released v 3.0 of its browser plugin and has set a new standard in social bookmarking in the process. It not only allows you to bookmark and save notes in an easy to retrieve place, it adds a new dimension to the Web itself by revealing, at the page level, the community of people who have also interacted with the content. It also feeds into a bigger community of content that builds a social network around relevant information. It combines research and community.

Starting simple: You can bookmark and annotate relevant things that you need to reference later. Using the Webslides function, you also can share these links as a slideshow, which actually appear as “live” web pages. The slideshow is embeddable on Web pages and in blogs. Revealing a new layer of the web: The new sidebar gives you quick access to your bookmarks as well your annotations on each Web page. It also shows you other diigo users who have annotated that page to give you additional perspective. The sidebar is searchable to find your notes quicker and easier. Connect and Engage: According to the company, you are what you annotate. Bookmarks, tags, and annotations are one of the best representations of your interests and expertise. At Diigo, you maintain a bookmarks page which is your hub to relevant content. You can also connect to like-minded people and also browse their activities as they relate to you.