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Diigo, known for its social annotation, finally went public yesterday. The service aims to turn the web writable allowing users to privately or publicly annotate any website they visit, in turn making a “participatory and interactive media” for its users. I must say that even though I have had an account for Diigo’s private beta since I last reviewed it late December, I have been anticipating its launch. So much has changed since my last review including social bookmarking enhancements, new annotation tools, tools built for bloggers, and more. It’s only been one day since the public launch and I have already seen mixed comments about the service ranging from extremely happy to down right brutal, but both sides with some strong points. My say? I think it’s a great service because once you start using it, you will realize that it is much more then just bookmarking. Diigo has features that can please just about anyone. You can bookmark a site, take notes, save snippets of text and graphics, highlight sentences on a site, and even share notes on a site with others. If you are a writer, Diigo will allow you to keep your notes and highlights organized and allow you to write a blog post and publish it, all within the service. Diigo also makes it easier for users to bookmark and annotate by providing them with a browser extension (Firefox, Flock, and IE), or if you prefer, a bookmarklet (Diigolet) so you do not have to install anything. The hard part though is standing out as the unique and powerful service that Diigo is and not appearing like it’s just another Del.icio.us clone. To further illustrate my point of Diigo being more than just bookmarking, let me give you an example scenario. Currently, I’m working on making an online store for my company and I’m beginning to research shipping and handling for our products. I searched around the web and found an article with helpful information so I bookmarked it with Diigo. Being that I bookmarked it, I was then able to highlight the strong points of the article and add notes to the areas that I wanted to add input to. Now, the next time I visit the site, all my notes and highlights will appear ( assuming I have the Diigo toolbar enabled ). But lets take this a step further. I’m not saving these notes just for myself. I made the notes to share with my partners and that is just what Diigo allows me to do. I locate my bookmark in Diigo and forward the bookmark to my friend which provides them with my notes in the email along with a link to the article I annotated. Now, this link that they receive in the email is special because it allows them to view all my highlighted text and notes on the page without being a Diigo user. Even more so, if they do have an account with Diigo, they can add notes in reply to my notes and highlight text themselves on the article! Now that’s teamwork ;-). I have decided that because Diigo has such a wide range of features and, from what I can tell, most people feel it is simply a bookmarking service, the best way to describe Diigo is by showing how it differentiates from the crop. So, I am going to go over the main features of Diigo one by one to show what exactly Diigo is capable of. Be sure to also check out the Demo Tours and Features Overview at Diigo’s website.

Bookmarking Diigo has all of the basic social bookmarking features. You can bookmark any site, add a description and tags, and allow others to comment on your bookmarks. Now, remember, Diigo isn’t built specifically for bookmarking but for annotation. With that said, you can attach highlighted text and notes to any bookmark and even simultaneously bookmark to other social bookmarking services, such as Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Shadows, RawSugar, and more. Why would Diigo allow you to bookmark to other social bookmarking services? If I had to guess it’s simply because many people are already comfortable with services they use, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need Diigo for its annotation. I can use Diigo for annotating a page and then bookmark it to Diigo and Del.ico.us and because the notes are saved to Diigo, the next time I go to that website from my Del.icio.us bookmarks, the notes will be there. You don’t have to use Diigo for its bookmarking - entirely optional. You may also import your browser or Del.icio.us bookmarks to Diigo and export them when needed. Publicly saved bookmarks can be found in the community section along with a tag cloud to navigate through them.

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.

To use the highlight and find feature, you just type in the textbox that you use for normal searching but this time either click on the button for each word of the search term or the highlighter button. It sounds like a lot involved with the toolbar, but really once you start to use it, you will grow to love it. I mentioned that Diigo is not only a social bookmarking service, but also a social annotation service. Diigo lets you highlight any text on any site and bookmark the page saving the highlighted text. Once the bookmark is saved, the next time you visit the bookmarked page, you will still see the text you highlighted, but this time with a blue underline. You can save multiple highlights on a page and even save sticky notes to each highlighted text area that you saved. This is excellent because there are many times that I have wanted to keep a note of something specific on a site and couldn’t and later on forget why I bookmarked it in the first place. Now I can keep notes on pages so I know what I was thinking at the time. On top of all of this though is that you can set public sticky notes. Meaning that when a Diigo user is to set a note to public on a page, any other Diigo user will see the note as well when viewing it. I also should note that in order to save a public note, you must have atleast two friends to help cut down on abuse with notes on sites. Diigo has many other great features. One feature that caught my eye was the importing of bookmarks. Instead of importing a saved file to Diigo, it will actually open a popup listing all your bookmarks from your browser and let you import each on all at once or individually. It also tags them all by default using the tag, “Links” along with the name of the folder it was found in from your bookmarks directory. This is great because I don’t have to make any file or anything to import bookmarks. Another feature that I thought was interesting search page for Diigo. Diigo has searching in the interface itself, but unlike other services, it also has its own search page that lets anyone search Diigo (even if you aren’t a member). Instead of showing results in the Diigo’s website itself, it will show results on a page in a format much like Google’s which makes it a whole lot better, in my opinion. Another feature that Diigo has is friends. You can add friends to your bookmarks page so you can easily view their bookmarks when you want.

Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation: the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed. Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments. The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo. The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page wisely noted: Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick. This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available. On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference. All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services. My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community. Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you. Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article. There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities. The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice. Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools 11.13.2006 @ 11:07 AM — Filed under: Social Bookmarking

7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better Than Delicious

I’ve used Delicious for a long time to manage my Web bookmarks. It was easy to use, accessible from any browser, and worked well with Firefox. For all my needs, it was a great bookmarking service.

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

NeoArch July 25, 2006 Diigo Criticism Filed under: diigo — NeoArch @ 8:52 am Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares - Mashable* Diigo is being criticized over on Mashable for being just one more social bookmarking site. That’s all well and good. I guess when you create a new social tool you should expect that–unless, of course, you create a good one. And that, my friends, is what Diigo is. So in answer to the who cares question, I offer the following: Who cares? Bloggers. Trust me. I am one. On several blogs. A large part of blogging is just countering other bloggers. It’s sorta like what I am doing now. Who am I kidding? It is what I am doing now. The advantage to bloggers is twofold. First, Diigo allows you to store your notes right on the page of the blog with which you disagree. Second, Diigo has blog functionality that lets you blog right from Diigo. Which is what I am doing now. Tagging and blogging can occur seamlessly. And it allows you to have multiple blogs. Try doing that with the Performancing plugin (which I love.) Who cares? Researchers. They have wanted a tool like this for years. I don’t know how many times I have wanted to put marginalia on a blog like I do my books. Now I can. Others can as well. I am a librarian in an academic institution. Trust me. Researchers will use this. Who cares? Anyone who uses the web. This is the type of tool that has a wide appeal, especially for those who do not already use a social bookmarking service. This one IS better than others. This one DOES offer something others don’t. This one DOESN’T just clip text. This one puts your notes right where you want them. Hey, I realize there is some truth to the Web 2.x hype. Who wants another social site that has a name that sounds like a Star Wars character. Put if you’re going to fault Diigo for anything, fault it for having a stupid name. Don’t fault it for competing in crowded space. It fills a need for many people, just like all the mom and pop Linux distros out there do. It is marketable, as is evidenced by the fact that over 10,000 people signed up for the Diigo Beta test.

You should know about Diigo! Filed under: Uncategorized, Technology, folksonomy, diigo — NeoArch @ 9:09 am To those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, I want to apologize for posting infrequently lately. I have had a couple other projects that I have been working on, plus my Church had vacation Bible school last week. You don’t get much done during VBS week. I just wanted to take the time to inform you about a new social bookmarking service. For those of you who already have one, you’re probably groaning, “Not another one!” I know. I know. I have been using Del.icio.us for…well…forever. I can’t remember life before Del.icio.us. In fact, I have no intentions on ceasing from using Del.icio.us. (With Diigo and its toolbar, I don’t have to, but more on that in another post.) For those of you who don’t have a social bookmarking service…well…you need one. Social bookmarking is a way to keep track of all of the websites that you visit. It allows you to describe the page using several one word “tags.” For example, if you visited the page for “Talladega Nights,” you might tag it as “movie,” “Will_Ferrell,” “stupid,” and “NASCAR.” This may seem like a useless service until you cannot find that page with the thing that you needed for your job and now you’re gonna get fired cause you can’t produce what you said you could. Or perhaps you can’t find that online add for that ring for your wife that you saw that would save you $1000 so now you can’t get a new johnboat because you don’t have the extra $$$$ you would have saved. Trust me. You need one. There are several out there. Diigo is different, though. The service is only in beta testing at this point, so you have to actually request an invitation to participate. Diigo not only lets you save a bookmark to the page, but it also allows you to highlight content. It lets you add virtual sticky notes to the page. This really is the ideal tool for research and blogs. You can access your thoughts about a certain web page from anywhere in the world, right on the web page. How many times have you wished that blogs and webpages worked like books. You wish that you could add marginalia. You wish that the marginalia could be either public or private. It’s all possible with Diigo.

Don’t just take my word for it. Go try out Diigo’s playground for yourself. If you don’t think the service is the coolest thing since Cocoa Pebbles (it’s like cereal, only chocolaty), then walk away from your keyboard, go get in your 1973 Ford Maverick, throw in your favorite Captain and Tenille 8-track, and …well… you get the picture. I have just started using Diigo in the past few days, so I will have more to say about it later. However, I do think that this is one of the best social bookmarking sites that I have used. Long live Diigo!

Diigo is fantastic social bookmarking and proto-blogging tool, marrying the best of del.icio.us, the leading bookmarking site, and Google Notebook, a recently upgraded and highly flexible tool for interacting with and reviewing your websurfing experience. I didn't spend much time with Google Notebook once I discovered it by way of comparing del.icio.us with Google Bookmarks, but I played with it enough to notice a lot of excellent features that del.icio.us did not have, including the ability to automatically associate bookmarks with a current project, flexible blog-like layout for groups of bookmarks, and collaboration features. As I moved bookmarks into Google Notebook, I started to realize I would be missing out on some advantages of del.icio.us, such as strong interconnectivity through tagging and an exceedingly simple and crisp interface. Enter Diigo, which retains del.icio.us's advantages while sprucing it up with notetaking, tagging flexibility, and collaborative features that rival Google Notebook and then some. I compare these three approaches to bookmarking on four fronts: tagging, blogging, collaboration, and "other stuff".

Tagging: When I'm surfing, I almost never want to slow down to tag or detail the links I'm saving. I'm either just browsing, and I just want the page to be saved in some repository of "cool" somewhere I might be able to check it out later, OR I want to save the page and others to come back to for some project I'm working on. Although its actual tagging features (labelling) are limited, Google Reader was cool because it would automatically save links to the notebook I was currently working on, which seemed easier than having to tag the page every time I save for del.icio.us. Diigo isn't quite this easy, but it does provide the option of setting default tags so I can cruise through surfing without pause. It also allows you to change tags for multiple bookmarks at once, a feature that has been delayed in del.icio.us during the extended wait for version 2.0. Winner: Diigo

Blogging: Sometimes, I don't want to put a whole lot of thought into consolidating my links into one coherent group. In this regard, all three services provide suitable options for tossing together semi-coherent groups of links on independent webpages for others to see. Google Reader does a good job of making scraps from around the internet look palatable; see this example about ultralight backpacking gear, but it does not offer the same level of interconnectivity that del.icio.us or Diigo provide. A similar example from del.icio.us shows it's limitations: the links cannot be groups under one note or be put into any order other than alphabetical or chronological, and pictures and other non-bookmark material cannot be added. Diigo does not have any of these limitations: its lists can be ordered as you please and divided into sections, and they are built independently of the tags, so you can draw bookmarks from anywhere into the page, as you can see in this example. The option that makes Diigo stand out is its ability to transcend the status of "proto-blog" by easily exporting links to the blog of the user's choice. By simply selecting links and clicking "Send to Blog >>", a skeletal blog entry is started in Diigo which can be fleshed out and published on the spot. Winner: Diigo

it has a lot more features than my current favourite, del.ico.us:- Longer description when bookmarking pages.- Saving bookmarks to Twitter (if you are into that!)- Web links can be automatically saved to del.ico.us and 3 other social sites.- Instant bookmarking of a web page (one click save)- The toolbar has an icon which shows whether the site has been bookmark previously.- Bookmarks can be tagged read/unread status- There are highlighting and collaborative features like sticky notes and site comments/- You can import from other social bookmarking tools (del.ico.us, magno.lia.com, furl, etc)- Images can be clipped and saved.- Embedded videos can be captured and saved (supporting youtube.com, myspace.com, video.google.com, video.yahoo.com, atomfilms.com and many others)- You can send bookmarks to major blog platforms easily (one of my favourite features)- Cached feature: archive of the original bookmarked webpage can be accessed- Diigo's Site Communities aggregate users who bookmark & annotate the same website & build meaningful reader communities.-Dashboard: A quick glance of all the latest activities from you and your friends on Diigo. Check out public bookmarks and annotations your friends have added, see what groups they have joined or created, and other interesting activities they are doing at Diigo. also shows you all of your incoming messages, friend request, group invites and more.