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Diigo Introduces WebSlides Sep 6th, 2007 by moultriecreek The folks at Diigo have been busy adding new features to their research-friendly bookmark platform. Today they introduced WebSlides which allows users to select a group of bookmarks, arrange them in a specific order and turn them into a slideshow. What is really cool about this is viewers are looking at a show of live sites - not screenshots. Slideshow creators can include background music - or even narration - to the show although trying to keep the audio and video synched is a stretch. WebSlides is still in beta, but you can view several sample slideshows to get a feel for the system. One of them is even about genealogy.

Wow is not a good enough word for this! lol I enjoyed your WebSlide presentation…. Janice

It was a lovely presentation, indeed! And thank you for featuring my little home town’s website as an example; I got TONS of people stopping by and taking a look. Much appreciated!

Here’s how to set up Related Articles links using Diigo. First, you will need to use a blogging platform that allows you to include RSS feeds within your posts. I use WordPress - the installed version, not the hosted one - and a plugin called inlineRSS.

Each entry includes a friendly name (which you’ll use later in your blog post), a comma, the URL of the feed that you copied from Diigo, another comma and the number of minutes between refreshes. I’ve got mine set to check for new additions to the list every 60 minutes. Now, go to your blog post and enter the following code at the point where you want the feed list to be displayed: That’s it!

But Diigo had a few other features that I also enjoyed. First of all it allows me to expert and import sites with my del.icio.us account which was convenient. It also allows me to make a blog post of my finds right away. I can add tags just like with deli.cio.us and that helps me to keep organized. I can also search the finds of others using Diigo. Diigo was originally designed to be helpful to researchers so I find it to be very user friendly. But the part I REALLY enjoy, is the opportunity to HIGHLIGHT the parts of article I am reading that I find to be interesting or important. If you ever saw a book after I am done with it, you'd see highlighting all over it! I am so happy to be able to extend this habit to my web surfing! I can also add "sticky notes" with my comments on them which is akin to writing in the margins. I love doing that too!

To label it as a simple bookmark service would be unfair; it’s much more than that and could very well emerge as an oft-used research tool in my browser

Though initially overwhelming, Diigo has been made as user friendly as possible by its developers. The multitude of features could easily kludge up a site but the Diigo team has made quick work of them. It’s design and UI are top-notch - so much so that I recommended Diigo to another company as an excellent example of creating elegance out of chaos.

What I find most interesting about Diigo is precisely what turns some off: the scope. This is one of the most full-featured and in-depth Web 2.0 products I’ve seen in a long time. Rather than focus on one headache of the social Web, the company is aiming to solve seemingly all of them.

Somehow, I find myself trusting Diigo more than Facebook, although you can connect to Facebook via Diigo. What's also present is the potential for "Diigo-spam." Ok, I've spammed everyone in my addressbook. I can't remember the last time I did it, but I hope that if you received an email via Diigo from me, you'll jump in and give this a try. If you don't want to, hit delete. Do I think Diigo is that powerful a tool? Well, yes. It offers something Delicious doesn't--groups, and a base of operations that interfaces with other tools. If I could share information using Diigo, ohmygosh, one ring to rule them all. One of the other aspects of Diigo I liked was that the Diigo crew is hopping to improve things. Importing bookmarks from Delicious API wasn't working well (i had to try 3-4 times), so they came up with an alternative way to accomplish the import. Dean Shareski complained about the interface, and they re-did the user interface. There's also talk of creating an education (student) friendly Diigo....

Easy group subscription - I wish there was a URL I could share with people. They click on it, and bam, if they have a Diigo account, they're subscribed. If they lack an account, it walks them through the process then makes sure to hook them up with the group. I just don't see how to do it easily now.

Everywhere I turn, people are joining Diigo, forsaking the simplicity of Delicious for the social nature of Diigo, which offers a variety of ways to connect with others--highlight text, then save it to your bookmarks, post to your blog, send it out as a tweet, and share it with a group of like-minded educators. The power of the network...comes alive in a way that removes the onus of commercialism so prevalent in Facebook.

For online services, the importance of developing user-friendly and accessible Web sites is of paramount importance. This article is about user testing

usability testing was carried out prior to a planned redesign

A questionnaire does introduce a certain level of artificiality

Write on Web pages 7/31/2006 SPONSORED BY E-Mail This Printer-Friendly Since I use the Internet so much for work, I'm always looking to get more from it. Fortunately, Web programmers are working away at improvements. When I research for my show, I often print out Web pages and make notes on them. That's such a waste of paper! I try to be as "green" as possible.

That's were diigo comes in. It allows you to make annotations directly on Web pages. It also helps you manage your bookmarks. You can make these public or you can keep them to yourself. It's a valuable tool! You'll need to sign up for an account. And you should try the toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer. There's a bit of a learning curve. But I think you'll find it worthwhile. diigo.com

Diigo is by far the most fully featured social bookmarking site in this list, and offers several unique capabilities. The most notable feature is that users can highlight text right on the page, as well as make annotations via a “sticky note” for later viewing.There are also other very useful features. I particularly liked the sophisticated and advanced search option for doing a keyword search of one’s own or public bookmarks. On that page you can limit a search by a phrase, and restrict a search to a URL, title, comments or highlights. You can even search “on” specific users as wellNote that when you place a “sticky note” to comment on a page for your later viewing, that note is viewable by anyone else in the Diigo community that views that page too! .There are some other interesting and unique features on Diigo. For instance, when highlighting a word on any page with Diigo’s bookmarking tool, a drop down menu automatically appears that allows users to search for that highlighted word on various search engines, social bookmarking sites; blogs, on the active site and more. I also had much more control in formatting when saving a page; and had an option to forward the page to another person as well.What about the all important group feature? Well, Diigo rounds out its offerings very nicely by just this month launching its “Groups” function. That feature looks to be a clear and elegant way to allow anyone to set up a private environment for sharing your bookmarks. Ultimately, if you combine the Web annotation capabilities with the ability to share in groups, Diigo has created a very enterprise friendly social bookmarking service. And, according to a spokesperson at the firm, this Groups function is “just the first of many more advanced group collaboration functions that we will be introducing in several phases” So we look forward to staying tuned!My Grades:Group Function Capability: AResearch Value: A-Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A-Fully Featured: A-(only missing “related users” and “larger topics”)

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