Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques.

Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses.

Other Stuff: del.icio.us is so barebones that there's not much else it offers. Google Notebook's advantages are all outlined above but are held to some degree by Diigo, though Google does hold out the possibility of superior future integration with its other products. In contrast, Diigo's additional features abound. You can include a linkroll of Diigo bookmarks on your blog/website that includes your comments on webpages when people click on the links from your linkroll. Diigo also updates del.icio.us with all of the bookmarks added to Diigo, so you do not lose any of the benefits of the del.icio.us community. In addition, Diigo can automatically post to your blog based on the sites you've bookmarked and commented on. Winner: Diigo

simple instructions

databases would be https

implementation similar to

http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/moulaison/FrenchStudies.htm

linkrolls from delicious

diigo instead

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?