Group items tagged

Social search has a brand new contender - Diigo Currently social search appears to be the hottest topic on the internet. The theory is that more useful and meaningful search results can be gathered regarding the true value of sites by getting users to recommend websites rather than utilising a series of computer generated algorithms.Traditional search engine results, such as those supplied by Google and Yahoo!, are primarily based on objective criteria such as counts of the backlinks from other sites. These links are seen as votes on the importance of that page for a given set of criteria. Social search allows users to assign their own votes regarding which sites are worthwhile, by sharing bookmarks of favourite sites, adding their own subject tagging, or making annotations to listings. This creates a more subjective set of results, which some feel can more accurately reflect which sites are most meaningful for particular search terms. The concept of social search has been continually evolving since social bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Shadows first appeared through to more involved services such the social networking sites MySpace and MyWeb, or the social news source Digg.Now a new player has appeared on the scene. Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) which was launched on Monday aims to combine a number of features such as shared bookmarking, blogging and web page tagging into a single service along with a powerful toolbar search tool.Diigo promotes itself as an online social research and "social annotation" tool, allowing users to:"Collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere”. By letting users quickly create their own comment on sites as well as highlight, clip or make sticky-notes for webpages, and providing access to organic search or their own social search results, which can be adjusted to suite the users preferences, Diigo has created a service with several interesting resource sharing and community promotion features. By taking onboard search features normally associated with search toolbar extension filters such as the ability to restrict keyword searches to the site you're currently viewing, the usability of the search functions have been increased to make this a useful service regardless of whether the user is looking to fully immerse themselves in the online social environment.While there is currently no direct official link between social search results and organic results obtained on the traditional search engines, many users have recently started to find information from the likes of MySpace creeping in. With Google and Yahoo! both having their own networks it looks likely that more of the features and results will either be merged together or be offered alongside each other so that you can get different sets of results depending on your preferred search method.Whether Diigo is here to stay or is set to quickly disappear like many other social search sites, remains to be seen, however the simple customisable interface and powerful set of useful tools make this one of the best offerings for some time.

Diigo 3.85 (A/A-)Diigo is by far the most fully featured social bookmarking site in this list, and offers several unique capabilities. The most notable feature is that users can highlight text right on the page, as well as make annotations via a “sticky note” for later viewing.There are also other very useful features. I particularly liked the sophisticated and advanced search option for doing a keyword search of one’s own or public bookmarks. On that page you can limit a search by a phrase, and restrict a search to a URL, title, comments or highlights. You can even search “on” specific users as wellNote that when you place a “sticky note” to comment on a page for your later viewing, that note is viewable by anyone else in the Diigo community that views that page too! .There are some other interesting and unique features on Diigo. For instance, when highlighting a word on any page with Diigo’s bookmarking tool, a drop down menu automatically appears that allows users to search for that highlighted word on various search engines, social bookmarking sites; blogs, on the active site and more. I also had much more control in formatting when saving a page; and had an option to forward the page to another person as well.What about the all important group feature? Well, Diigo rounds out its offerings very nicely by just this month launching its “Groups” function. That feature looks to be a clear and elegant way to allow anyone to set up a private environment for sharing your bookmarks. Ultimately, if you combine the Web annotation capabilities with the ability to share in groups, Diigo has created a very enterprise friendly social bookmarking service. And, according to a spokesperson at the firm, this Groups function is “just the first of many more advanced group collaboration functions that we will be introducing in several phases” So we look forward to staying tuned!My Grades:Group Function Capability: AResearch Value: A-Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A-Fully Featured: A-(only missing “related users” and “larger topics”)

the ability to create your own customized group where you could share your bookmarks within a own defined group—such as a workforce team, department, project team, or any other defined group. That article provided a list of social bookmarking firms that fit that criteria, and included a detailed feature comparison chart

the four most important criteria for a social bookmarking sites’ applicability to internal/enterprise searching:1. Group function capability. How easy is it to create a new group? Can the group remain private? Other group features?2. Research value. How much of a page can be saved; are there advanced and precision search features?3. Design/Interface/Ease of Use. Is it a pleasant experience to view and use the site? Does it show evidence of being intelligently thought out and designed?4. Fully Featured. In the Knowledge Management supplement, I focused on these features:Ability to create an RSS FeedSurfacing of “related tags”Surfacing of “related users”Tag suggestionsTag cloudImport/export bookmarksAbility to crate larger “topics” or hierarchical categories

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.