Features of Diigo As a personal research tool, you can use Diigo to, Bookmark, highlight texts and add sticky notes to any websites that you want. All changes are persistent - that means you can see the same highlighted texts when you are browsing through the same page again.

Group a web page with tags and lists. Access all your research anywhere because all your bookmarks are stored online. Search for a bookmark by a full text search, sticky notes, tags and more. Share your research with others in multiple ways - send to blog, linkrolls, tagrolls, by email, post to other social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc. Automatically post findings to your blog with all the comments, highlights, etc. Easily find the most popular content on Diigo to stay up to date with the hottest news. Get recommended content based on your activities in Diigo. Get related content while browsing the Internet - I recently stumbled a website with loads of useful comments from Diigo’s users. Import bookmarks from other social bookmarking sites to Diigo. The “Save Elsewhere ” feature allows you to simultaneously bookmark sites to Del.ico.us, Simpy or Ma.gnolia.

As a collaborative research platform, you can use Diigo to, Join or create a private or public group to share and collaborate with people of the same interests. Add private sticky notes that are visible to only members of the same group. This creates a platform for instant discussion (or debate!)

Group tag - to enforce tagging consistency within a group, the group admin can set a list of recommended tags to be used by other team members. Get recommended news from your Diigo’s friends - from Diigo’s sidebar, you can also see who is currently reading the same page too!

Extract comments / notes by other users on a website.

After testing Diigo for a while, I love the fact that Diigo maintains all the annotations and comments that I’ve previously left on a web page, which speeds up future revisions on all of my previous findings. Furthermore, there are many specific public groups to join that will definitely help to expand my knowledge.

Diigo, in my opinion, is not only an online research tool; it is a living knowledge sharing community.

In their own words from their website; Diigo enables effective collaborative research. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues. A project team, a class, or a club can create a group on Diigo to pool relevant resources, findings and thoughts together.

for those of us who hate wasting time researching for something, and enjoy using the power of others to discover other information, Diigo social bookmarking is right up your alley.

How do I highlight the important arcade information? This another great feature of Diigo for bookmarking is the right click context menu. With Diigo installed, when you highlight a section on a page, your menu will come up with an option ‘Hightlight and Bookmark’.

Last but not least, I have noticed how well Diigo works with twitter and some people who request to be friends on Diigo first can end up being part of your twitter network as well.

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques.

Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses.