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Annotation - Content Highlighting and Notes The key feature of Diigo is annotation. Users can bookmark a page and highlight text and images on the page to take note of. Highlights on a page by the user will then save and appear as a blue dashed underline whenever they visit the site again. Hovering over a highlight will bring up a menu where the user can optionally add a note to the highlight and make the note private or public. Highlighted text with notes attached to them will appear as a solid underline in blue. Also, if you browse to a site that other Diigo users have highlighted or added notes to, you will see their highlights on the page (if saved publicly) colored in orange. Being able to bookmark and annotate a page is very helpful. In terms of research, you can bookmark and annotate all the sites related to the topic you are researching. When your done getting all the information you need, select all the bookmarks in the “My Bookmarks” area and select in the top right drop down, “Extract highlights.” This will then grab all your notes from all the sources you’ve saved and display them on a clean page for you to look over and print. This is a great tool for bloggers as well. Gather up all your sources for a post your working on, add your notes, and when ready, select all the bookmarks and blog about it using Diigo’s built in blogging tool (explained below). Blogging I personally prefer blogging straight through my WordPress installation, but for those of you that want to take notes, gather sources, and easily publish a post to your blog, Diigo may be your solution. Diigo allows you to add multiple blogs to your account, verify them, and easily publish a post, however you may only publish and cannot manage old entries. What I like is that while you browse the web and you come across a site talking about a specific topic you want to expand on, you can right click and select, “Blog This,” which will then direct you to the blogging area where you can write your post along with that site being your source. The other method is by simply going to your bookmarks section and selecting a bookmark, or multiple bookmarks, that you want to write about and then selecting the “Blog This” option from the top right drop down menu. All the sources, highlighted text, and notes will be included in the post document, which you can easily remove if needed, ready for you to write. It’s not an entire blogging platform, just a simple publishing tool that works. Browser Toolbar and Bookmarklet The Diigo toolbar, available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, brings most of Diigo’s features right to your browser. The toolbar allows you to easily bookmark websites, highlight and note pages, search documents for keywords, search terms in a page using your favorite search engine, and it even brings all bookmarks right to the toolbar. The toolbar also is what makes it possible for you to see highlighted text and notes that you and other users have made on websites you visit. Bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking the Diigo button and filling in the tags and highlighting just involves you highlighting the text you want to save. One of my favorite features is the “QuickD” button (not in the above screenshot) that I recently came across. The QuickD button allows you to save a bookmark to Diigo with one click without needing the original Diigo popup to appear and adds a default tag to it (you may also fill in tags in the search box of the toolbar to tag it) so you can just click and go. What if you don’t want to install an extension to your browser? That’s fine because Diigo also provides it’s user with Diigolet, a browser bookmarklet that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate any website as well as view annotations on pages left by other Diigo users.

The fundamental problems of annotation, regarding construction and usability - remain, even though the web infrastructure has opened up.

The memex concept of “trails” doesn’t seem to be captured by many of the current systems (except perhaps TrailFire and ShiftSpace? ) I think the wiki article on memex covers the differences: http://en.wikip....org/wiki/Memex

We could be wrong about that, perhaps Diigo or some evolved form of Google Notebook will be the One True Meta-web the market selects. But we should at least stop to consider what it means to have our online culture be privately controlled (or pseudo-publicly controlled; ICANN, etc.).

Search has led us astray. A better solution may well come from the way we filter information in real life (where we can’t search cause its not free, there’s no google for the real world). We start locally with things we trust and bring in sources local to those. I trust the NYT and my friends, and find new things to trust from there. When I want to find out something, THAT’s the set I want to search.

Stickis.com brings to YOU information from YOUR socially proximate and trusted sources. Wherever you browse the web, it tells you what your personally selected Crowd of friends, bloggers etc have said.

Blogrovr.com does this for blogs. Tell Rovr what blogs you like and wherever you browse on the web, rovr tells you what they’ve said about the page you’re on.

Wade Ren April 11th, 2007 at 6:04 pm Re: Meer on Diigo - “90% of those features (except annotation) are rarely used by a regular web surfer. Indeed, web annotation itself is not for 90% of the users, and is likely to be adopted only by the minority of the web users who consume information diligently. After all, everyone knows that having a pen and a highlighter while you read is really helpful for digesting and retaining information — but how many actually do it? For the minority of the users that do make use of web annotation, our user feedback tells us Diigo’s other features are quite appreciated. In addition, the Diigo plug-in is completely customizable, allowing users to only keep the features they want

For this reason, we are positioning JumpKnowledge as more of a personal annotation tool and not a social annotation tool. This allows us to focus JKN and make it easy as possible to use for non-technical creators and readers.

This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic.

Wade Ren April 11th, 2007 at 11:54 am Nick, Thanks for covering the web annotation area and mentioning Diigo here. Since the Techcrunch review last August, we have been developing lots of new features and we hope we can give you a demo soon. As a sort of quick showcase of Diigo, click this link to see some annotations on this post http://srl.diigo.com/11xq — no plug-in is needed and you can be using any of the major browsers (firefox, ie, opera, safari) .

Stickis Subscribe to only the annotations you want Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin.

We’re looking forward to achieve a point where we not necessarily compete but can share resources and standards and work together to finally make this great potential for a metaweb to come true.

eyalnow April 18th, 2007 at 9:02 am I discovered Diigo two months ago, became an avid user and a self-proclaimed product evangelist, and recently started working for the company. Diigo for me is the knowledge-management solution I was looking for. What sets diigo apart is that it handles *Knowledge*, rather than mere links. It is the ONLY solution that lets me *permanently* highlight and annotate specific text on a webpage, which is then saved to my diigo profile. Diigo complements the mental process in which a sentence “jumps” at you, and you make a mental note about it. By highlighting the sections I deem important, I better understand and remember what I read. I believe there is scientific proof for this. As time goes by, I’m building a repository of all the important Knowledge I find on the net, which I can easily manage, tag, retrieve and aggregate. Regarding the ’social’ aspect: Diigo provides me immediate personal benefits, and I can then share this knowledge with others of my choosing, and follow what other individuals or groups are finding on the net. Not just the pages(links) they are browsing, but the actual sections that they deem important, and their reactions to it. I think that Diigo is not only for ‘researchers’. Most of us conduct some sort of research whenever we read a news article, shop for an appliance, view photos or videos, or read a blogpost. Although I appreciate the other services, and might occasionally use some of them, I find that Diigo already incorporates and combines MOST of their important features, in a way that is more robust and scalable. Diigo specifically addresses the issue that was mentioned in the introduction of this tech-crunch comparison - mark up the web and make annotations on webpages.

I diigo! Do you diigo?

I diigo! Do you diigo?