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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

Besides simply tagging and storing bookmarks online, Diigo seems to offer a couple of unique features focused on the idea of annotation and collaboration. Diigo's power comes from the Diigo toolbar. With the toolbar, a user can quickly access stored bookmarks tagged as "Links" (or other tags by simply changing the filter) via a traditional folder. From this toolbar, searches can be executed across all bookmarks, blog search engines, or any incredible number of sources of interests such as Movie/TV or Shopping. There is also a one-click access to your "Inbox" on the toolbar - essentially allowing real-time access to tags you are trying to track.

Here is what the folks at Diggo have to say about the extension. Several powerful features are combined in the Diigo toolbar to make this a real “power extension” and must-have for anyone who browse a lot of stuffs online. An All-in-One Bookmarking Tool: bookmark to Diigo, delicious, Simpy, furl, spurl and make them permanently cached and full-text searchable. A Powerful Blogging Platform : Annotate webpages and quickly turn them into blogs with a built-in blog editor or enhanced linkrolls. A Great Collaborative Tool: share and interact on online findings, complete with highlights and sticky notes. The Most Customizable Search Tool: like Google’s toolbar, but fully customizable, so you can add any other specialty searches - dictionaries, music, movies, references, and maps. Here is a comment I found via the Mozilla Add-ons Web site that I think fits Diggo perfectly. Diigo is the best bookmarking tool that I’ve tried. And this extension is a must! You can bookmark a page right from your context menu, which includes highlighting parts of the page when you bookmark, and you can also forward a bookmark to someone. I don’t even keep my bookmarks in my browser anymore - I got tired of looking at 100+ jumbled bookmarks in my browser, so now I use the Diigo extension to retrieve them. I like being able to bring them up as-needed, but the rest of the time they’re stored at my Diigo homepage.

But when it comes to online research and collaboration, are the usual social bookmarking services really the best possible tool for organizing that flood of online information? If you've bookmarked the same website several times over, or misplaced an important bookmark among a hundred others in your list that share the same tag, the limitations of tagging as an organization tool will be clear. And if you're like me, sometime you'll find a certain bookmark easily enough, only to discover that you can't remember precisely which single sentence it was that made you bookmark the page in the first place!

Diigo.com takes social bookmarking to a new level of usefulness.

For research and writing collaboration, in particular, I'm finding all of this a real time-saver.  Normally, for example, you might point your colleague to a social-bookmarked page you'd like them to read — but then you'll often need to take the time to explain its significance in a separate phone call, chat message or email.