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Diigo: Social Bookmarking and More... By Tim Lauer on January 6, 2006. Discuss it below Diigo is a new social annotation/bookmarking tool. In one respect it is similar to del.icio.us. It even takes advantage of the del.icio.us API so that items that you tag or bookmark with Diigo, are also tagged to your del.icio.us account. Where it is quite different from del.icio.us, is that you can also more fully annotate your bookmarked pages, and bookmarks can also be saved locally. You can highlight and tag specific images and paragraphs from web pages, and also add sticky notes. These sticky notes can be public or private. For example if I tag and add a sticky note to a page, I can also see other sticky notes left by others or I can send a notification to a colleague so that she can read my annotation and respond. I can also use Diigo to save my selections and annotations and review them later. I can also forward them on via email. The Diigo toolbar puts all of these tools at your disposal. The Flash Tutorial gives a very good overview. The more I play with Diigo the more it looks like an interesting alternative/compliment to del.icio.us. Technorati Tags: del.icio.u

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.

If you’re one of the expanding list of genealogy bloggers, chances are good you frequently find things online you’d like to write about. In addition to copying the quote, you also need to grab the site’s name, article/page title and link. Diigo, my favorite online research tool, can help make this process a whole lot easier. Diigo’s “Blog This” function builds on its highlighting and annotation features to make it easy to capture information and incorporate it into a blog post. The feature works with WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Moveable Type, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal blog platforms. Here’s how it works . . . Setup The first step is to set up your blog so Diigo can access it. Log into Diigo then click on My Tools. Now click on Blog This in the left column. When that page appears, click on the +Add a new blog link. Enter the address of your blog in the URL field, then click Next. Now enter the username and password you use to to access your blog and click Add New Blog. Your blog should now appear on your Blog This page. You’re ready to start blogging. Blog This As you browse the web, you come across a tidbit you’d like to write about. Highlight the text you’d like to include in your post, right-click and choose Diigo > Blog This from the popup menu.

In the example shown here (configured for a WordPress blog), you can see in the left column that this post is going to my Family Matters blog as a draft in the News category. What you actually see will depend on what blog platform you are using. I may post a “quick and dirty” item directly from the Diigo editor, but generally I will send the highlighted text to my blog as a post and finish it off there. Either way, Diigo has made it easy for me to include web content in my posts - saving both time and effort.

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

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.