Diigolet | Diigo - add the “Diigolet” I am so glad Diigo has this “Diigolet” feature which will let me continue using Safari as my primary web browser. I do like FireFox, but on my Mac find Safari much snappier. Plus I like monitoring a few select RSS comment feeds on my Safari bookmarks bar.

the aggregators lead you to articles or sites that you want to save and remember. And for that, I have another favorite tool: Diigo. While it would be easy to describe Diigo as a social bookmarking service, that would make it sound too much like Del.icio.us or Furl or Reddit (all of which I’ve tried and tired of at various times). It’s really more of a research tool with social, collaborative features. Most importantly, Diigo (which is operated through a toolbar that works in the Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers) allows you to bookmark pages on a list that’s saved forever online and accessible from anywhere. No more messing around with your Web browser’s built-in bookmarks, which won’t be available to you if you happen to log into the web from a different computer. Just as fun, Diigo makes it easy to highlight passages within a Web page—so you can return later and see what it was that caught your attention—and even attach floating “sticky notes.”

You can also attach tags to your bookmarks to make them easier to find later on, and you can click on individual tags to see what other Diigo users are bookmarking publicly under those tags. (As a journalist, I’m secretive enough about what I’m researching online that I tend to keep my Diigo bookmarks private.) In late March, Diigo rolled out Version 3 of its system, which includes enhanced “social browsing” features such as the ability to see how other people have annotated a given Web page, follow what your friends are bookmarking, or subscribe to other users’ bookmarks based on tags.

Despite my best efforts, my bookmarks had gotten out of control. Something had to be done.

That’s when I came across my new favorite tool. It’s called Diigo, and I use it every day. Diigo allows you to highlight and save blog articles. Pre-Diigo, I would bookmark an article, and when I wanted to reference it, I would have to read the entire article again to get to the part I wanted. Now I highlight and bookmark the article, and when I want to access that information, I go straight to what I need. Diigo even allows you to put sticky notes directly onto blog posts and articles. You can add your own comments so that you know why the heck you saved and highlighted the article in the first place. The highlight and annotate options are particularly helpful if you do research prior to writing articles.

You can even highlight a portion of an article, click “send,” and email just that snippet to a colleague or friend. The emailed snippet contains a link so that the recipient can access the original source if they want more information after reading the blurb. You can also add your own comments when emailing snippets.

Last week I asked if anyone knew of some code that would allow me to directly use WordPress to digest the daily links I collect rather than use del.icio.us as the middleman. Though it is certainly technically possible, there doesn’t seem to be a ready made solution. Sam Hiser suggested that I check out Diigo. I like it so much that I deleted my del.icio.us account.

Everywhere I turn, people are joining Diigo, forsaking the simplicity of Delicious for the social nature of Diigo, which offers a variety of ways to connect with others--highlight text, then save it to your bookmarks, post to your blog, send it out as a tweet, and share it with a group of like-minded educators. The power of the network...comes alive in a way that removes the onus of commercialism so prevalent in Facebook.

Somehow, I find myself trusting Diigo more than Facebook, although you can connect to Facebook via Diigo.

Diigo goes a step further. Diigo is really more like a mash-up of social bookmarking and social networking. It is as if Facebook and del.icio.us had a child and named it Diigo. Like del.icio.us, Diigo allows you to post your bookmarks online, tag them and share them. However, Diigo allows to to create a network of friends and see what their recent activity is - much easier to see the new items bookmarked by your friends than in del.icio.us. There is also a comment wall which allows for friends to engage in conversation or discussion about sites. Additionally, Diigo allows you to create lists in addition to tags. Tags allow for a dynamic set of resources to be viewed. Lists allow you to create a static set of resources when necessary. It is another option for organizing bookmarked sites. You can also designate sites as favorites. Finally, Diigo allows you to create groups so that people who might have something in common can share bookmarks with the group that they think the other members of the group might find interesting. Diigo is quickly becoming a favorite resource from what I can tell by listening in the twitterverse. Good site to check out.

Thanks for a great post. Interesting “analogy” Like to add: Diigo’s web annotation (the ability to add highlight, sticky notes) to any part of a webpage is another very unique and core competence of Diigo’s offerings. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. Unlike most other web “highlighters” that merely clip, Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page, just what you would expect if you highlighted or wrote on a book! Moreover, all the information — highlighted paragraphs, sticky notes, and the original url — are saved on Diigo servers, creating your personal digest of the web, your own collection of highlights from the web - ones that are meaningful to you!

Whether Web 2.0 actually ever existed is irrelevant, but the innovation brought to us these last two years is undeniable. The big question for me has been: “Does the innovation actually do anything for us?” I think I have tested and reviewed over 300 startups in the last couple of years, and I can honestly say that most of this innovation has been directed at entertainment or rather useless “cuteness”. Diigo as a tool, could be viewed as a much more serious innovation by comparison.

Diigo has fairly effectively expanded its reach into the social networking venue even farther. Aside from that, the inherent tools available on Diigo as a aggregationa and research platform have been expanded greatly also. So many startups have been either hyped or constructively accentuated that it is sometimes difficult to put an actual value on them, this is not the case for any of Diigo’s faithful users.

The “community” buzz word has really invaded our Web consciousness these days, but the actual effectiveness and potential productivity of these communities is what should really be stressed. Diigo’s community, in using all the function of Diigo’s innovation and refinements, has the ability to help build relationships based around perhaps our greatest asset – knowledge. Diigo’s latest release of Version 3 illustrates the proper metamorphosis of a truly valuable community, or content and data reflected on a growing and engaged set of people. The innovators developed a way to collect and store knowledge efficiently, and then refined the platform to foster collaboration in learning.

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.

I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done.

2. Sidebar- The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser. 3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items. 4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar. 5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity. 6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.

To label it as a simple bookmark service would be unfair; it’s much more than that and could very well emerge as an oft-used research tool in my browser

Though initially overwhelming, Diigo has been made as user friendly as possible by its developers. The multitude of features could easily kludge up a site but the Diigo team has made quick work of them. It’s design and UI are top-notch - so much so that I recommended Diigo to another company as an excellent example of creating elegance out of chaos.

What I find most interesting about Diigo is precisely what turns some off: the scope. This is one of the most full-featured and in-depth Web 2.0 products I’ve seen in a long time. Rather than focus on one headache of the social Web, the company is aiming to solve seemingly all of them.

Every so often you come across a service that really fits into your life. Diigo is that for me. I never understood what the excitement was over sites like delicious. I never saw any practical use for it. However, I see many uses for Diigo. A big one for me is how you are able to use it as a research and knowledge tool and how it will allow me to be more time efficient. For one of my freelancing jobs, we talk a lot over email since we are all over the country. I hate when I find a cool article and then I have to send it to each person (I am still trying to figure out how to make email lists on Gmail). This service would allow me to bookmark the article and each person on my team can then decide if it pertains to them (instead of me trying to figure that out). You can set up different groups too. My personal group wouldn’t have to wade through my work bookmarks. Another feature that I love is that you can highlight articles and leave notes for yourself. Currently, I have a ton of bookmarks that I did, and I can’t remember what was important in those articles and why I bookmarked them. When doing research, I would love to be able to note that I have already looked at different web pages.

On the more personal side, there are several features that are just fun to play with. First, you have People Like Me. That feature will show you what other people who have bookmarked the same site as you also bookmarked. It will also suggest people that are close to you in your bookmarking behavior. You are able to import your bookmarks from other sites, so you don’t have waste your time doing that again.

It is a tad overwhelming at first when you are trying to figure it all out. However, it is worth your time.

What does this tool do: It is (still) most valuable as a tool to save and organize your bookmarks, so you will never lose or forget a saved-site again. But the latest upgrade adds much greater depth to previous versions.

To call Diigo just a bookmark organizer is like calling Ella just a singer. But the truth is that your first and most obvious value will come from Diigo’s ability to store and search out your lost bookmarks like no other free program available. You can also highlight and file short sentences within a URL without saving the entire site. Plus you can search text as well as tags and easily forward your best links on to your friends. If you want additional layers of social networking, note taking, and added research ability, this tool satisfies. But you should plan on a gradual ramp up to proficiency. In order to take full advantage of Diigo, it will take some effort to make it sing for you…but in the meantime, it can sure hum.