Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

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.

WebSlides is not yet available for testing so we could not get in depth information on the slide creation UI and other features. However, the demo presentations are fairly awesome in presenting selections with music. I can think of at least 10 other uses for this tool - one of which might be used to rate news stories in collections (with voting). If the developers continue to improve on the exceptional "in show" page functionality - then WebSlides will be quite something. This service is deceptively simple in appearance, but making web pages functional within a relatively interactive slide show is not a simple feature. I like WebSlides and look forward to testing the service and also seeing how it is enhanced in the coming months. Combined with Diigo's other services, this fascinating tool could go viral quickly in my estimation. Check it out and perhaps comment on your ideas for its uses.

Written by Markd on September 6th, 2007 at 5:58 pm

This is brilliant. Next time you’re going to a meeting where you want to show a selection of websites. Don’t worry about collapsing them all, just create a slideshow out of them.

Written by kam on September 7th, 2007 at 9:36 am

this is excellent specially if you make a combo of this and ur iphone.. sweet

Summary Most of my readers are probably saying: "Phil has tested way too many betas!" Summing some of these developments up is rather like holding water in a net. For once I can defer this task to someone more capable than myself: "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 personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can mark-up and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." Conclusion As Chris Shipley, DEMO's executive producer says: "It would be easy to dismiss Diigo as yet-another social bookmarking tool, but that would be a big mistake." In this instance Chris has not overstated a development's capability. Webslides embedded and noted inside a blog can spotlight any series of posts and topics with "live" pages and advertisements. If we think just slightly outside the box here it is not difficult to imagine video and audio annotation following highlighted text from several pages for an on-the-fly sales pitch or dissertation on any subject. Information, knowledge and interests gathered around people rather than people running to find fragments of data. This is Web 3.0 (if there is such a thing) in the development stages.

Level 5: Collective Social Interaction with Content (We in Museum) This is the holy grail of social discourse, where people interact directly with each other around content. Personal discussions, healthy web bulletin boards and list-servs fall in this category. Healthy level 5 experiences promote respect among users, encourage community development, and support interaction beyond the scope of the content.

So how do we level up? The good news is that moving up the levels does not require new content. At all levels, the interaction and participation can occur around pre-existing content. A lot of museums top out at level 2 or 3, imagining that offering people heightened opportunities to interact with content, or to create their own content, is enough. Granted, I’m not sure if social engagement is the goal for interactive designers. But with side benefits like deeper connection with the content, greater appreciation for the museum as a social venue, and heightened awareness of other visitors, it deserves a place at the drafting table.