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Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

Diigo. Takes social bookmarking / social annotation to a whole new level. It’s been written up in Techcrunch and CNet. No point in repeating the good news. How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. CNet One thing about Diigo. One gesture to Diigo can simultaneously update all your other bookmarking sites. That may create a lot of duplication, or it may create the opportunity to connect with others across a world of tagging that remains fragmented. I shall continue experimenting with it.

The Good: The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers. Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation. The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad: A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion: Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.

Making the potion: Focusing on the research process

I wrote about reflective learning, and really identified with Will Richardson’s and David Warlick’s comments about focusing on the learning and community

Sharing bookmarks–another route other than wikis is to have students set up accounts on del.icio.us or Furl or Google Notebook, because these tools not only allow students to bookmark their findings, but to share their bookmarks with other students.  Diigo not only allows students to bookmark their sites, but annotate them, clip them, and share them on a blog, email, or album.   Bookmarking a collection of sites that they can use later conveys the idea that the learning is ongoing, that they can “add to” what they have found later, in a way that a set of notecards or a bibliography doesn’t, because they seem more “final” and product oriented.   And these sites allow them to network and learn collaboratively from one another.

The point here is, Diigo is not really a bookmarking site. The essence of this tool is research and secondarily productive community.

using all the function of Diigo’s innovation and refinements, has the ability to help build relationships based around perhaps our greatest asset – knowledge. Facebook, MyBlogLog, Digg and a host of other communities are based

Diigolet | Diigo - add the “Diigolet” I am so glad Diigo has this “Diigolet” feature which will let me continue using Safari as my primary web browser. I do like FireFox, but on my Mac find Safari much snappier. Plus I like monitoring a few select RSS comment feeds on my Safari bookmarks bar.

3. Diigo has shown a committment to listening to its users. Well at least the educational users, and they have been making small changes almost daily since Lisa Parisi held the elluminate session this past Sunday. Maggie Tsai and Wade Ren have been in and out of multiple conversations on Diigo and posting on edubloggers pages (Look up) to actively understand our needs and look to make changed in Diigo to fit the educational model… You can be offended by the “hate” comment Wade made, but this is his company and he wants to make change to satisify folks… I really like delicious since I was introduced to it a year ago. Easy linking, I can tag from a tool bar with comments I can build a passive network… But Delicious is not listening to folks or making changes even though they “introduced” their version 2 about a year ago, and it has not appeared. Even the tech bloggers are taking delicious to task for this. The responsiveness that Wade and Maggie have shown so far is really impressive in my opinion. Just wanted to share my thoughts on why I am continuing to investigate and use Diigo. I know that you feel a bit targeted for “not drinking the coolaid” but I think what you are getting hit hard on is if you don’t like the service you do not have to use it. Or with the participation Wade and Maggie are showing get involved and see if it can become what you would like to see… Just my thoughts, Scott

# Scott Weidigon 02 Apr 2008 at 10:27 pm Jim, I went to post this on Diigo and then hit my back space and went to a different page and lost everything boo… but I thought that I would post here instead. I am becoming more enamored over time with Diigo. At first I didn’t get the hoopla… I don’t “do” facebooks and myspaces etc. and I have enough of a hard time keeping up with twitter (don’t know how coolcatteacher and Dembo follow 1000+ folks… ) so I didn’t think much of the social side. But it could host links and re-post them to delicious so not too bad… here is what is changing my mind. 1. Bookmarking… on one hand it is the same as delicious tags yadda yadda… but I can now tag a s ite, send it to friends in the diigo network and outside of it, forward it to a specific topic group and throw it into a specifically designed list at the same time! That is efficient in my mind. the Twit thing is neat too so I don’t have to tinyurl it and post to twitter… and I can even keep my delicious account updated through Diigo so I don’t have to do double work… (and when i imported it brough my delicious notes that was a nice touch)

2. Annotation/stikites/highlighting. We all research and move information into different places, google notebook, MS OneNote, Zoho Notobook… but those pieces of information are then only our notes and ideas… Diigo’s highlighint and annotation allows you to make any page a conversational document. That is powerful. I just played with it for the first time today and was blown away with ease at which you could do this. those notes can then be seen by any diigo user. The collaborative possibilities are astounding. if you have not tried this or seen it go to http://lisaslingo.blogspot.com and scroll down to the Best Day Ever post. If you have your Diigo sidebar open you will see two notes, and the Highlighing that Steve Kimmel did. Also, I don’t know if it is showing up yet I tagged a sticky note next to the first picture there… my comments appear in the side bar, but I see the note markup and I am thinking others will to eventually, but am not sure. Think of all the times your teachers ahve been trying to teach textmarking but can’t in the Textbooks… now we can do this to the web.

Diigo, pronounced Deego, is not just another social networking site. Diigo is a research tool and a means to keeping notes while searching the Internet. Founded in 2005, Diigo continues to mature as the premier internet-based research tool. For well over a decade, my bookmarks have been machine specific and usually destroyed and lost when I've changed machines. Sure, people have options to save, import, and export bookmarks but I've never wasted my time. My philosophy has been, "If I can't find it again then it wasn't that important." Silly, I know. Today, though, there is something compelling about the service Diigo that might change my Internet surfing behavior. Two years ago, Diigo was marketed as a research tool. This year, Diigo is marketed as a social bookmarking tool. I'm not really into social websites - except FriendFeed. The idea that everything must be shared is total nonsense. I do not share all of my bathroom visits and cannot bring myself to believe sharing my Internet surfing habits are any more valuable than the waste products being flushed down the pipes. Still - I was curious enough about Diigo to activate the account and try out highlighting, commenting, and writing this blog post. First, I added the Diigo toolbar to firefox. Click, done. Setting up the "Send to Blog" was just as easy. I simply added the URL, name, and password. Diigo did the rest.

Social search has a brand new contender - Diigo Currently social search appears to be the hottest topic on the internet. The theory is that more useful and meaningful search results can be gathered regarding the true value of sites by getting users to recommend websites rather than utilising a series of computer generated algorithms.Traditional search engine results, such as those supplied by Google and Yahoo!, are primarily based on objective criteria such as counts of the backlinks from other sites. These links are seen as votes on the importance of that page for a given set of criteria. Social search allows users to assign their own votes regarding which sites are worthwhile, by sharing bookmarks of favourite sites, adding their own subject tagging, or making annotations to listings. This creates a more subjective set of results, which some feel can more accurately reflect which sites are most meaningful for particular search terms. The concept of social search has been continually evolving since social bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Shadows first appeared through to more involved services such the social networking sites MySpace and MyWeb, or the social news source Digg.Now a new player has appeared on the scene. Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) which was launched on Monday aims to combine a number of features such as shared bookmarking, blogging and web page tagging into a single service along with a powerful toolbar search tool.Diigo promotes itself as an online social research and "social annotation" tool, allowing users to:"Collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere”. By letting users quickly create their own comment on sites as well as highlight, clip or make sticky-notes for webpages, and providing access to organic search or their own social search results, which can be adjusted to suite the users preferences, Diigo has created a service with several interesting resource sharing and community promotion features. By taking onboard search features normally associated with search toolbar extension filters such as the ability to restrict keyword searches to the site you're currently viewing, the usability of the search functions have been increased to make this a useful service regardless of whether the user is looking to fully immerse themselves in the online social environment.While there is currently no direct official link between social search results and organic results obtained on the traditional search engines, many users have recently started to find information from the likes of MySpace creeping in. With Google and Yahoo! both having their own networks it looks likely that more of the features and results will either be merged together or be offered alongside each other so that you can get different sets of results depending on your preferred search method.Whether Diigo is here to stay or is set to quickly disappear like many other social search sites, remains to be seen, however the simple customisable interface and powerful set of useful tools make this one of the best offerings for some time.

Diigo - experience feedback After 10 days of use to the daily newspaper, I am convinced of the interest of Diigo and I decided to adopt it. I continue by prudence to feed my Delicious account obeying the currency of our wise grandmothers: not to put all our eggs in the same pannier. Some additional assets of Diigo: It is possible to post with the choice: only its own annotations, all annotations thus including those of the thirds or any annotation. By recording new a bookmark, one can characterize it “with reading” it appears then in fat in the list; it is more easily locatable for a second reading. I use this function when I envisage to study the bookmarkée page again or when I wish to take again the tags after examination of the Web page. One can also post the list of all the bookmarks to reading. There are 2 even 3 types of possible annotations with Diigo: 1) you associate a comment the page - 2) you stick a post-it with comment directly in the page - 3) you underline an extract of the page. If you make a research and that you want réccupérer in an aggregate way your underlined comments, annotations and passages - nothing simpler: notch the bookmarks and click then on “extract highlights” in “more actions” (see the explanation) - Essential!! One can be registered with the list of a person even more specifically to the one of his tags.

Ever-since we got a sneak peak at Diigo, I've been playing around with it and marveling at the latest feature releases. Diigo is the product of hardwork, deep understanding of what end users want, and one of the most feature complete social annotation services I know of. Last week, the team at Diigo released some great updates that make it all the better reason to switch from whatever social bookmarking tool you're using, to Diigo. Here's a rough outline of what the team has been up to:Easier to Bookmark: Recent updates allows users to add a 'Diigolet' to their bookmarks; a button that allows you to add whatever page you are viewing to your Diigo bookmarks, an invaluable tool for information hungry users.Importing/Exporting: Badges are the 'hip' thing right now and Diigo doesn't want to miss out on it. So, they will be releasing a linkroll that will allow users to add their recent bookmarks to their blogs or websites to share what they have been bookmarking. You can also import your Del.icio.us bookmarks to your Diigo account.Toolbars: The Diigo toolbar has also been upgraded. You can blog about the page you are viewing with the "Blog-This" button, as well as instantaneously add the page you are viewing to your bookmarks.

Our design philosophy is simple -- what makes the most sense to us as users, what we'd like to have as users ourselves, and what are some creative ways to do things even better... We'd like to continue thinking out-of-the-box, and not to be totally bound by traditional framework or method of doing things.What Diigo has to do is really stick out to users; and that's pretty hard to do when there are a great number of other competing services. That's exactly what Diigo does. For those that are looking for a head-on review, I suggest you take a peak at our initial preview.

Building a Grassroots Research Directory As part of my tag housekeeping chores, it dawned on me that the new groups feature in Diigo can be put to good use in developing a genealogy research directory.  I've created two groups FL Genealogy Resources and GA Genealogy Resources and I've been adding links I've already collected to them. 

This example shows the Florida group page.  Using the tag "cloud" on the right, you can select the topic that most interests you to see the links available.  The size of the font quickly tells you which tags have the most links.  Yes, this is a pretty basic directory at this point, but as more people join this group and add their own links it will increase in value - a grassroots effort.  My first group experiments are set up for state resources.  Florida and Georgia are my biggest research areas and I'm a native Floridian so I've got the skinny on resources in my area. I don't have to suggest a link be added and then hope someone posts it, I just do it myself.  In the process, I'm adding value for all researchers.  Tagging sites like Diigo give us the opportunity to share our knowledge with those we know - and those we don't.  With little effort on our part, we can build a valuable research network letting everyone participate and benefit from the results.

Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]