Strongly Recommend: Use Diigo! According to our surveys, many oD readers are involved in research in some form or other: as students or academics or media-folk or policy makers and influencers. So here is a recommendation that might well change the quality and usefulness of the web for you. The best research tool I have come across in a long time - it has really transformed my web habits - is diigo.com, which gives me the ability to make notes as I read the web, to collect all my notes in one place and to share the notes with collaborators. After joining, my recommendation is that you download and install the diigo toolbar - it makes adding notes and index-files of what you read very easy. It also has a number of other nice features that you'll probably end up using - for example, you can highlight a word and perform a Google search on it without any further typing, which I liked ... Once you have joined diigo, make sure you sign up to the openDemocracy group on diigo. Joining the group will allow you to see the bookmarks and annotations from everywhere on the web of others who have chosen to share their notes with the openDemocracy group. You'll see when you create a note - the options are pretty clear. Once you have signed up to the openDemocracy group, you can have a look at an example of the group annotation feature here where Anthony and I have commented on the UK Labour Party Deputy Leadership attitudes gathered by OurKingdom. diigo.com is the web tool I use most. I have met with Wade and Maggie, the brains and business minds behind it - I feel they really understand what researchers need and are working hard to supply it. I really look forward to using diigo.com more extensively on openDemocracy and exploring various collaborative experiments using it. More later ...but in the meantime, do sign-up to diigo.com

Robust & Customizable by ForbiddenDonuts on May 14, 2007 (rated 10) An all around excellent tool. While the average user will find it more than capable as a social bookmarking too, its real value lies in the ability to capture, highlight, annotate & share with specific groups of friends and colleagues. The extensive number of features does not inhibit the speed - the search is lightning-fast, which I consider an absolute necessity.

Pure genius! by Xena on April 15, 2007 (rated 10) This is hands-down the most invaluable research tool I have found. I do a lot of research, on a vast majority of topics, and this tool has made my life so much easier. Great job! This is something I cannot live without. It has changed the way I do research, and makes regular bookmarking and tagging obsolete, in my opinion. I love the fact that you can highlight the relevant parts on a page, add sticky notes, forward your information from the context menu, and all of your information is saved. I also love the fact that you can set privacy to default. And that once you install the toolbar (yes, I hate too many toolbars, too)that you can drag and drop the icons you want to other areas, eliminating the space another toolbar would take up. And viewing your information is effortless, with previewing your highlights and notes, without actually having to go to the website. Fantastic, great job, I wish I had found this sooner!

A powerful Social Annotation and Research Tool - DIIGO! Well indeed Diggo is the coolest tool I have ever come across on the web2.0 scenario. It is a social annotation tool, social book mark tool and a online notes. Fits good to the best researchers online, it is a team tool, that leverages the time spent online. You do not waste a single minute and not waste the time spent in finding data and loosing it. Find it, mark it, send it, store it, import it!! surprising, this is all accomplished by a single tool and it is so much under rated.

With Diggo you can be rest assured you have the data saved and sent in seconds! Once your fellow researcher (or a friend) gets online on the same page, knowing or by chance, he can see that you have left a message for him. All you need is, both of you will have to install the Firefox/Internet Explorer/Flock/Opera browser toolbars. These toolbars will make sure both of you do not note the same or miss an important data.

Not only researchers, or known friends, but also strangers with same interest can make use of (rather exploit) this tool and do wonders. Say for example a bird watching community is on the prowl for a rare bird, or the very famous Flamingos, they all land up in a page that has abundance of information about the Flamingos, they can mark certain text in the page and leave a comment. Say a professor is leaving a comment about the Flamingos, and their migratory pattern, the others can see this note, respond to it! Later people with the same tool (Diigo toolbar) come to the page can see the conversation that has happened on the web, and note that this page is quite popular.

You’re browsing sites, left and right. You come across something that interests you and you say to yourself, “Self, this is something worth blogging about on your blog.” But you forget to make a note of why you want to write about it. What will you do? What will you do?

Another tool that helps me is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). It’s a social bookmarking site with abilities far beyond those of mortal bookmarkers

While viewing a web page — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account. But I can also leave notes on that page. These notes can be for my eyes only, or I can make it to where anyone with Diigo who chooses to view anyone’s notes can view them. The purpose of these notes is for me to “mark” parts of a page like I would printed paper. Diigo says you can make notes on web pages for anyone who doesn’t have the toolbar installed. So, conceivably, you could point your visitors to other places and markup the content for further reading. Perhaps you’re commenting on an article that would make more sense to viewers if you could actually show them where on the page you’re talking about.

I’m finding these new tools I’m capturing them with my Diigo tool that allows me to annotate, tag and share the findings and from there I can find other links, tool or people that have also found this site interesting.

So many ways of discovering that rely on others, but through effective ways of collecting, organising (and sometimes sharing), a really complex web of information can be navigated.  So in the spirit of sharing, feel free to browse my Diigo space - it’s a developing set of tools that I think could be useful, are interesting or quite simply cool.

Diigo (dee'go) gives you 'social annotation' But I will call it more than annotation. Because Diigo team have managed to bring together social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, together into a single product. Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media.I have been using many a tools to do what Diigo offers and I am enjoying it very much and I have just began.My research, either for my numerous weblogs or my physics classes, I can do with Diigo. Get the tool bar to make it really useful.

Diigo Research Tool Diigo does a very good job of searching tags across several sources and presenting results, and can also serve as a collaborative research tool. On a search for classification it picked up results from del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg - a mix of social bookmarks and blog postings. Google links comes into play when you inquire on a specific article - but the Google backwards link search is known for being incomplete and weak. This information is displayed on the About page for each result along with tags, bookmarking names, postings, and comments -- all in all a very informative page.

But Diigo is more than a metasearcher. It's a collaborative research tool. You can form groups here, and add your bookmarks to Diigo and other services you use. In addition you can clip pages and add stick-notes.

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (www.judsoncollege.edu). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (www.diigo.com). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.