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.

I've been using Diigo for quite some time now to annotate, bookmark and share webpages. Now, they are offering a new functionality with the potential to become an even more effective tool to share knowledge in a great format as the video explains. Imagine collecting all your different web pages to research a vacation or group trip, annotate them, add voice commentary and then share them with friends or participants. Also, a travel agent could put together a collection of information and send it on in an attractive form to a client.

I’ve been using Diigo for quite some time now to annotate, bookmark and share webpages. Now, they are offering a new functionality with the potential to become an even more effective tool to share knowledge in a great format as the video explains. Imagine collecting all your different web pages to research a vacation or group trip, annotate them, add voice commentary and then share them with friends or participants. Also, a travel agent could put together a collection of information and send it on in an attractive form to a client.

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again  Annotated New feature from Diigo (currently in private beta testing): create a slideshow of links with highlighting and sticky notes. You can record audio or add music to accompany it. I could see this having potential for basic tutorials or demos; you could do this instead of using screencast or recording software.

Today Diigo announced the preview of an interesting new application that lets you turn your bookmarked web pages into a slide show without any hassle. Here's a demo , or click the YouTube video above. They'll be showing it off at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, which I'll be attending today. Says Alison from Diigo: WebSlides is a browser-based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes, and highlights as a portable and interactive slideshow. WebSlides also allow people to record a narration track and also incorporate background music to make the presentation even more ...

With the use of a tool such as webslides, students could then view the web site with the article or link to the primary source of the research. The students could view the websites with annotations by the teachers to support the students’ current level of understanding of the material or add additional information or questions to enhance the instruction. Students could then work in their groups to discuss their findings to their peers. This would allow students to come to their own conclusions from the information that they are presented. The assessment could be the presentation of their findings and conclusions via a posting to the class website or some other tool that would allow them to present what new ideas they synthesized and not a high tech presentation with little to no substance. Students would work in the same manner that other scientists around the world are by looking at the new data from research. The article was posted on the 20th of this month, two days ago, and students could be researching about the discovery tomorrow the 23rd. This changing of ideas also illustrates to students the way in which scientific knowledge changes and gets refined in light of new information from researchers. So could this lesson be taught without computer technology? Absolutely but technology allows the instruction to be much more fluid and connected. The teacher could run off all the articles, write on them and make copies for the class, but the exchange of information would likely not be as fluid.

There are a few posts I’ve written here where I’ve mentioned the phenomenal bookmarking service call Diigo. It’s something I use all the time.

The folks at Diigo have pushed the envelope a little farther with something they’ve recently announced call WebSlides. The reasons for using such a service are numerous, but the one I see being used the most is for bloggers to highlight other sites. Another use is to create a presentation about your own blog for visitors to get to know about your place. It might be a nice addition to your sidebar or About page. A presentation is very simple to make. While in your Diigo account, you select the sites you want to include and save them to a list. You can then add an audio file for background music or narration if you like. Readers can adjust the speed at which they move from site to site. They can pause it or even click on the sites provided in a list at their own pace — all without having to create a Diigo account of their own. I’ve explained more in my own presentation, so click the button below and take it for a spin. (Btw, yes, that’s me narrating. )

I’m glad you took the time to drop a comment here. I really appreciate all that you guys do, and please know that you have a strong supporter of your service as I’ve talked about it a few times here and on my other blogs. Keep it up!

whoopie September 14th, 2007 at 9:21 am ? this is a five day project for a college undergrad. yawn