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In summary, Diigo’s new sidebar is well designed. It allows me to focus on my work while, at the same time, giving me access to Diigo’s knowledge community. Improvements to Diigo Groups has turned this aspect of the Diigo community into a powerful way to distribute and refine knowledge among a team. And Diigo’s “varying degrees of non-intrusiveness” approach to social networking has infused a level of maturity into the social networking world that has been sorely lacking up to this point. There’s a lot of hype around Diigo right now, and the bottom line is that it’s well-deserved.

Diigo lets you highlight and share the web. Diigo 3.0 promises a next generation social bookmarking and annotation service that enables users to increase research productivity, readily exchange information, and connect with others who share their interests and concerns. Forget mere bookmarking, instead highlight portions of web pages, add sticky notes and create your own personal digest of the web with your collection of highlights for leisure reading. Easily search, access, sort and share this collection later. The new 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. Enter Social bookmarking 2.0!

In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked: “Is it really that easy?” “It sure is.” I replied.

Students Use Social Bookmarking Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”

If the Internet is your main medium for research, I believe that you know the importance of bookmarking and sharing your findings with colleagues to get the best information possible. Therefore, an online research tool will be very helpful in organizing gathered information while at the same time making it available to others for collaborative purposes. Diigo - a powerful online research tool fits perfectly for this need.

Diigo is a browser plugin that functions as a web highlighter, sticky notes, social bookmarking tool, and a social information network rolled into one. Once you have download and install the Diigo toolbar, you can start bookmarking websites, highlighting texts inside it, leaving comments and more.

Next, the knowledge sharing part of Diigo lets you share and discuss your findings with any available public or private groups. With Diigo, connecting with friends with similar interests can be done effortlessly through content sharing.

Diigo @ DEMOfall 07 - A True 3D Information App?

Diigo.com announced their re-launch today with an information network unlike any we have seen in  scope or capability. The new Diigo network being unveiled at DEMOfall 07 creates global communities around data, information, interests and knowledge. These new communities engage and connect people around the content they collect and use. Diigo is already one of the most useful bookmarking and research sites on the Web. The integration of Webslides and the power of "writing the Web" makes Diigo perhaps the Web's first truly 3 dimensional tool. I spoke with Diigo Co-Founder Maggie Tsai on Friday about their deep and groundbreaking vison. I covered Webslides a couple of weeks ago, but honestly did not envision the depth or scope of Diigo's potential. Maggie demonstrated the capability of a development nearly as complex and difficult to encapsulate as the semantic search engine's technology. The simple truth of Diigo combined with Webslides is that with continued refinements Diigo could well be the mega site imagined by many for Web 3.0. Diigo Plus Webslides Diigo users can create groups, lists, collaborative forums, do research, annotate or comment on pages and essentially build layers of data and knowledge atop any Web page. The concept of a multi-layered Web is difficult to grasp, but Maggie's team have begun to capture the power of what content-centric (their word my understanding) collaboration can do. "Writing" to the Web via sticky notes, annotations and highlighted elements combined with various collaborative elements is power for more than doing a research project. With the addition of Webslides - essentially an interactive, selective browser/player within a browser - Diigo provides a multifaceted platform for unbelievable collaboration and monetization potential. Diigo also unveiled another crucial element for "directing" data at users with their Webslides embeddable widget. This tool allows users to embed Webslides bookmark or RSS shows inside pages and blogs. These shows can be customized to express any number of topical or thematic blog posts, topical articles, product reviews, real estate offerings or just about anything one can imagine.

A Tall Order Diigo is certainly a fantastic individual or collaborative research tool, but inserting a platform like this into what we might call "the hub" (the center of what people do) of the Web has deeper implications. Bookmarking and social networking has seen massive appeal. The idea of wrapping users up in this core of data and knowledge has been touched upon by sites like Wikia, Digg, Stumble Upon, Facebook and many others in the various venues. All of these great sites gather content that is acted on and sometimes enhanced by users, but the data remains rather static or 2 dimensional for the user. Stumbled Upon comes closest to letting users "filter" the Web and its data but even there the great volume of information is lost or scattered with time. Diigo's methodology effectively turns Diigo into a Web within a Web of filtered, searchable and dynamic information.

Diigo www.diigo.com Diigo is my personal favorite for social bookmarking. Users can not only import del.icio.us or other bookmarks, they can also update those other services using diigo. In addition, diigo’s informational video and screencasts—accessible on its home page—provide a great introduction to social bookmarking. Diigo’s secondary features include a rich set of browser tools that allows users to highlight passages and leave comments on Web pages for other diigo users to see (a great way for teachers to effectively assess student assignments). Diigo also lets you send an email or blog post directly from a Web page, automate a daily blog post of your bookmarks with comments, or create blog or site widgets with your bookmarks. Founded in 2005 by Wade Ren.

Diigo is my personal favorite

12/1/2007