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Enlarge Space: If there are lots of people, who make annotations, the Wiki Pages will become unmanagable. By sourcing out the ThreadMode, the need for refactoring pages is reduced considerably

it makes an ugly page overburdened with annotation markers: DiiGo TrailFire programmers, please make a big toggle markers button!!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Diigo Review: Robust Social Bookmarking by Paul Flyer

Every now and then I get to write about something that takes a good idea and makes it better. When I first read TechCrunch’s review of Diigo back in March of 2006, I yawned, despite the reviewers enthusiasm. I had looked at many of the social bookmarking sites and saw nothing innovative. My own lack of enthusiasm for social bookmarking sites clouded my judgement when I read that review. > Today, I am a big fan of Diigo. If del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site and Digg is the most popular social news site, then Diigo should become the internet researchers tool of choice. Beyond basic bookmarking, tagging and sharing, Diigo offers a suite of tools that turn it into a robust research, annotation and note taking tool.

eyalnow comments: Your comment is awaiting moderation. Hi Paul, great post ! for me, diigo is mainly about information management and then about sharing. I agree with the thumbs up/down suggestion. it’s already possible to filter annotations by groups, which were introduced after you wrote your review what’s your diigo page ? mine is http://www.diigo.com/user/eyalnow March 27th, 2007 at 4:00 am

11. Oliver Schwenke  |  January 17th, 2007 at 1:28 am I have to agree with Ramon and the other Diigo users who left a comment here. In my opinion, nothing comes close to Diigo feature-wise.

3. Keith Manning  |  January 17th, 2007 at 7:57 am My comment is mostly for serious business use — mostly saving and sharing research. Diigo is already a great personal tool. I have tried several, and found that Onfolio was the best for my needs (until it was bought by the Evil Empire and emasculated). However, I am already finding Diigo to be better than Onfolio was at its best. I am anxiously awaiting the groups feature of Diigo. If it works as advertised, it will make Diigo a killer application for my company. It is already our personal research bookmarker. With groups, it will become a workgroup bookmarker, with the ability to collaborate in creating a bookmark set for each project. It promises to also give us flexible group definitions to support multiple, overlapping workgroups. Since our usage is commercial, we also want privacy. The “social” nature of some sites can be a positive disadvantage for users like ours. We would also prefer a paid service; I trust a service that has a fee-based business model more than I trust a supplier that is making money by indirect means. Also, I abhor intrusive advertising and cross linking. Having sung the praises of Diigo for our serious business application, I should add that we also use it for personal, more trivial purposes. Like sharing gift ideas, or discussing new gadgets. We used to use a private (TypePad) group blog for this, but since getting Diigo, the blog has fallen into disuse, and we tend to Diigo-annotated pages instead — note that Diigo has now become a transitive verb, like Tivo. -Keith

14. Ismael Ghalimi  |  January 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm Ramon, Oliver, Keith, Reading through your comments, it seems to me that Diigo is getting close to becoming a full fledged enterprise bookmarking tool in its own right. That’s pretty good news to me, for I hate having only one player in any category I cover. Let’s see how it compares to Connectbeam and the upcoming Cogenz down the road. Best regards -Ismael

Best Online Bookmarking Application Now that we know what’s out there, it’s time for a vote: Note: if you cannot see the voting form, please follow this link.