Karen has asked me to provide you all with more info on working with Diigo so that those of you who are a bit unsure about what you can do with it can get started. Below I’ve included some of its key features, but I strongly encourage you to visit their help menu, where you can access neat little flash tutorials on how to get started that are far better than anything I can whip up here. Some Diigo Features: Tagging: An easy, user-generated way to categorize and organize your bookmarks Annotation: write sticky notes that can be made public so you can interact and collaborate with others who are reading the same pages. Highlighting: Easy to highlight parts of pages, extract them, and collect them (great for research!) Groups: you can create public and private groups—a great way to organize group projects and add a level of privacy to Diigo that you may feel more comfortable with than making everything public. Privacy: Options for privacy are available on just about all Diigo features Search: You can search not just by tag name, but also titles, notes, highlights, and full text. Blogging Integration: “Blog This” feature allows you to move easily between browsing and blogging. Populate your blog post instantaneously with the highlighted texts you selected while reading a web page - a big time saver. Archiving: Allows you to save EXACT copies of bookmarked pages, which protects you from losing cool stuff that may disappear over time.   Photos: You can collect your favorite photos into albums Subscribe/Post Lists: Bookmark lists can be subscribed on the website and through RSS Community: find new content from specific users or based on tags, hot lists

A noticeable trend at Demo, according to Shipley, will be the move of enterprise class tools to the small-to-medium business class space. The conference will feature six new applications focused on collaboration that can be accessed and used by individuals without requiring the involvement of IT departments. Diigo is going to be previewing upcoming features to its Web collaboration service, which lets you meet online, highlight, clip and annotate Web pages with sticky notes and make slideshows out of the Web pages you visit. "We're adding social components that connect people with knowledge and knowledge to people," Maggie Tsai, vice president of marketing at Diigo, told . RSS feeds and tags can be converted into a Diigo Web slide and the service will let you search for people with similar interests based on their Web site collections. Web slides and online discussion groups can be public, limited to a specific group or totally private based on user preference.

Special preview: DEMOfall '07 highlights A new crop of startups take the stage to pitch their wares, and as usual, the accent is on Web 2.0 and collaboration

Access to and the sharing of information is this year's theme with companies demonstrating tools for team collaboration, tracking online information, information filtering, and a technology that is harder to explain than use: Turning the Web in a participatory medium for bookmarking, clipping, and discussion sharing. Diigo is both the name of the product and the company that turns a Web site into a "participatory" site, according to Wade Ren, CEO and co-founder. "Diigo doesn't need enterprise adoption to work, but the more people who do adopt it, the better it is," says Ren. Diigo allows users to highlight portions of a Web site and add comments, using the design concept of a sticky note or a cartoon bubble. The note is persistent, so next time the user opens the site, the note will be there. The tool is a browser plug-in that can be downloaded and placed in the IE or Firefox tool bar. While wikis like Wikipedia make sets of pages writable and editable, Diigo makes the entire Web a writable media, according to Ren.

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week. The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner. WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”. There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

The twice-yearly DEMO conferences, now in their 17th year, are known for seeking out and showcasing important new technologies that usher in new methods of computing. [DEMO is produced by Network World Conferences, a unit of tech publishing giant IDG.]

DEMOfall '07 is taking place September 24-26 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. It will introduce 69 carefully vetted products and services (see below) to "an audience of investors, business development executives, media, pundits, and fellow entrepreneurs."  I would expect attendance in the neighborhood of 700, based on past experience. Presenters include both early-stage and established companies.

DEMOfall: The wisdom of many, many individuals

The center of influence and knowledge gathering, organization, and sharing is shifting from a centralized authority to the many individuals at the edge of the network. In this session, the following companies showed their solutions for these critical knowledge work tasks: Diigo, Inc.: We spoke with Diigo last week while they were preparing for DEMOfall. Diigo combines web highlighting, note-taking, organization and sharing in a very nice package. Enabled by adding a bookmarklet to your browser (all major flavors are supported), Diigo is adding the ability to collect your web clippings into an easily shared WebSlide presentation. There is a Groups feature that allows you to predefine a distribution list for sharing information and the interface is nicely AJAXed to provide drag-and-drop organization of content. Diigo also provides a social network dimension that allows you to search across the public collections shared by other Diigo users to find people with similar interests. You can search by tags or profiles and extend your network to include others who have displayed a similar are of interest to your own. Inviting friends you already have is all well and good but Diigo provides a way to discover new connections in the web clipping sphere.

Chris Shipley kicked off DEMOfall 07 in a major way, claiming that everything is in a state of 2.0. And, by 2.0 she simply inferred to the fact that technology is innovating and revolutionizing across every sector. And after sitting through a day of DEMO presenters, so far it’s very clear that she’s absolutely right.

Diigo WebSlides Previews at Office 2.0 September 6, 2007 — 09:39 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This Diigo, the online research tool for business solutions, is previewing a new browser-based player at the Office 2.0 Conference today. This patent-pending player from Diigo, called WebSlides, lets you create a slide show with web pages. From a collection of bookmarks, you can indicate which web pages you’d like to include for your slide show, or just insert which websites you’d like to add. Use drag’n'drop technology to arrange and rearrange the order of your slides. You can leave “sticky notes” and highlights to indicate notes and further discussion around a particular area of a web page. This is useful for teams, as other team members can add to the sticky notes as well. There’s also the option of adding a voice over so your slide show can be narrated. Slide shows can be public or private, and shared with a select few. For viewers, the link to each web page displays at the bottom of the slide show, along with other viewing options for screen size, the list of slides in the show for easy navigation, and more. What this tool bar lacks is the option for viewers to grab the embed code, though creators have the option of sharing and embedding these slide shows.

I've personally had the opportunity to demo Diigo's new Webslide feature. I can personally attest that it's very easy-to-use and takes collaboration on the internet to a whole new level. Webslides allows users to showcase important data and information in a "real-time" session that does away with the traditional need to develop screen-shots pasted into a PPT presentation. Users can essentially turn any portion of internet into a PowerPoint show with a few easy clicks! Nice work Diigo!

Ever wondered how to create a guided tour for a website, or an easy slideshow of a selection of webpages? Unless you try and capture a series of screenshots, and them arrange them in something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, it's not exactly easy. Thankfully, you will soon be able to do such a thing online (with live-updating website views) as Diigo has previewed a new product called Webslides at the Office 2.0 conference.If you're wanting to know more about this rather nifty forthcoming tool, then read on as there's video and more after the break. How do you go about creating a presentation? According to Diigo, "users simply collect and organize any set of links into a list, and add background music or voice narration. By clicking "Play," the list transforms into a slideshow bringing Web pages and user comments to life." The fact that you can annotate, and even voice-over, these presentations is pretty impressive, and we can easily see how this tool could find a home in education, client proofing (for web designs) and more. If you're wondering how on earth this could be useful, we'd highly recommend checking out the example movies found on the Diigo website (such as this "Funny sites on the Web" slideshow)

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.

Monitoring my feeds, I’ve noticed there has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding a service called WebSlides. WebSlides is brought to you by the same folks that are behind Diigo, one of many social bookmarking services that are on the net. WebSlides allows users to take their bookmarks and turn them into a slide show.

The ideas and the possibilities, do seem endless. The service is currently in an invite-only stage of life however, I have signed up and if they provide me with an invitation, I’ll be sure to provide you with an in depth review.