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Last month I lamented the fact that I couldn't find a tool that would allow me to use a yellow highlighter on web pages. I wanted to recreate the feeling I get with books, where I could go to a page and see all of my highlights and notes. Enter Diigo, which is giving me a most satisfying online highlighting experience. Because I wanted to make sure that Diigo really did what it promised, I started with adding the Diigolet bookmarklet to my browser toolbar. (They offer versions for Firefox, Flock, Safari, Opera and IE.) Within seconds, I was happily highlighting web pages and adding sticky notes to my highlights. Even better, when I returned to a page I'd highlighted and activated the bookmarklet, my highlights and stickies were right on the page, not stored in a notebook as I experienced with Google Notebooks and i-lighter, my two previous solutions for online notetaking. After a week or so of the bookmarklet, I moved into full installation of the Diigo toolbar. This added the ability to instantly blog material that I'd highlighted and quick access to some powerful search functions and my bookmarked sites. It also ensured that my notes and highlighting would show up automatically every time I visited a page I'd worked on previously. I'm just beginning to explore some of the more advanced options, such as being able to forward my highlights and notes to others via email, and I'm sure that eventually they'll become useful to me. But if I'm honest, it's the yellow highlighter and sticky note option that has really sold me.

The good: Diigo imports bookmarks from elsewhere; tags pages by topic; lets you mark up and share Web pages; has a simple interface; toolbar and bookmarklet allow quick bookmarking; bookmarks simultaneously to rival services; searches text and comments within bookmarks. The bad: Diigo's subscription features are under construction; doesn't automatically merge similar tags; doesn't preview bookmarked pages. The bottom line: Diigo lets you save, import, tag, highlight, mark up and share Web pages--offering more advanced research tools than Del.icio.us.

“Diigo (dee'go) is about "Social Annotation". By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, 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.

Why it might be a killer: It combines features from a bunch of different sites into one thing, and all of these features work really well together. The ease with which you can add your content to blogs is really useful, and if students get word of this, it will make their lives writing papers and studying for their different subjects so much easier. When Diigo is criticized on blogs, there is a dedicated base of users that attack the bad review with proof of the site’s worth, which makes it hard to argue with.