Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done.

2. Sidebar- The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser. 3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items. 4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar. 5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity. 6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply. (Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

Use Diigo for static pages with useful content. Here are some suggested uses from my own Diigo love affair: Research. Why bother copying and pasting articles you’ll be using in your next paper or presentation when you can add them to a searchable database in one click? Publicity. If you have a blog, podcast, or other promotable work, you’ll want to clip all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. Diigo’s perfect for quickly and easily capturing those mentions for posterity and, since it’s shareable, you can show off your best clips in a snap. Want List. It’s not really a resolution, but I do plan to cut down on my expenditures in 2008, and one way that’s always worked well for me in the past is creating a “want list.” When I see a nifty notebook or gadget or safety razor I want to buy, I add it to the want list with the date. 30 days later, if it still sounds awesome, I’ll buy it. But often my enthusiasm for that nifty cable wrap I saw on Cool Tools has waned and I’ve saved twenty bucks. Lifehacks. Obviously. If you’re like me, you’re constantly gathering tips and advice on productivity and technology from around the Web. Save them here and go over them periodically to see which ones actually worked in practice and which were quickly forgotten. Recipes. Several recipe sites let you aggregate your favorites, but if you get your recipes from multiple sites, you can use Diigo to keep them all in the same place. Blogging. One of the big advantages of a social bookmarking service is the social part. Diigo makes it easy to share your links, post them to your blog, or even do an automatic daily post of links to your site.

The most pleasant surprises that I’ve had in this course is Diigo.  I’ve been a Diigo user for some time now, but this class is the first time where the ability to make public annotations to webpages has lived up to its potential.  It’s amazing to me to see discussions emerging in the margins of the articles I’m reading.  Diigo is perhaps the most profitable way that I’ve found to connect to insightful classmates.

Diigo: the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife July 24th, 2006 Just as PC World predicted, the bookmarking / social annotation powerhouse known as Diigo announced their public launch today. While others have been quick to launch a legion of bookmarking sites that are all nearly identical to one another, Diigo’s developers have taken the time necessary to produce the most substantive collection of annotation, blogging, and research tools available under one roof. Those who think that Diigo is “just another” bookmarking site are in for a big surprise when they start to explore the real capabilities of this little beast. When I first mentioned Diigo back in February, I stated that my favorite feature was the ability to bookmark across multiple platforms (such as Binklist, Furl, RawSugar, etc.) but what I didn’t realize is that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. “What are these great features?” you’re asking. Let’s take a look at some of them. First of all, the key to unlocking the secret world of Diigo is the toolbar. This tiny piece of software allows the whole of the internet to become an interactive work station. While the toolbar contains the standard bookmarking and search features you would expect, it also allows you to use the real gem of this suite: the Content Selection Menu. The Content Selection Menu is an innocent-looking little drop down menu that appears whenever you highlight some text (this feature can be turned on or off via the options menu on the toolbar.) The menu contains three categories of sub-menus: Diigo, Search, and Copy.

The Diigo sub-menu allows you to highlight selected text or to blog the text with Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, or Typepad. The highlight can be set to either public or private visibility. The private highlighting is particularly useful if you’re doing any sort of research that involves keeping track of bits of information from all over the web. The public highlighting is great for annotating web pages with “sticky notes” that other Diigo users can see when hovering over the highlighted text. One more important feature here is the ability to forward the web page without having to go through the trouble of composing an email to do it. So in one fell swoop you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, and forward without ever having to leave the web page. (One minor correction: the highlighting does not become publicly visible unless a public Sticky Note has been attached.) In the Search sub-menu you will find the ability to search your selected text across a potentially infinite number of search engines and online resources. The stock search menu comes loaded with about ten categories, each containing multiple resources. Whether you want to search a standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo, a blogging resource such as Technorati, News, Shopping, Music, Bookmarking sites, they’re all there, and much more. In addition, the search menu is fully cusomizable. Don’t need a certain category? No problem, just delete it. Want to add you own category? That’s no problem either. You can add, remove, and rearrange ’til your heart’s content. The Copy menu is short and sweet. And I do mean sweet! As much as I love all of the other features Diigo has to offer, this is quite possibly the one “must have” feature that seals the deal for me. This sub-menu has only two offerings: Without format, and With format. Anyone who has needed to cut & paste text from a web site into a blog entry, email, or word processing document should know the frustration of having to unformat the text in order to make it usable in your document. I had gotten to the point of just keeping Notepad open in order to quickly (and I use that term very loosely) unformat text before pasting it into my documents. Now with a single click I can strip the text of its formatting, making it ready to insert into the document of my choice. Like I said…sweet! I could go on and on about the wonders of Diigo, but you really aren’t going to gain a full appreciation for it until you give it try yourself. If all of these features (and I didn’t even cover them all) seem a little overwhelming, don’t worry. There is an extensive help section to guide you through. Why wait for Web 2.0 to come to your favorite sites when you can carry this cutting-edge tool wherever you go? Posted by Reginald Freeman