Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.

For longer articles or for posts where I want to highlight a particular quote or passage, I also use Diigo, which I've written about before. I can use it to bookmark pages, but I'm mostly interested in my ability to use a virtual yellow highlighter directly online and to add digital yellow sticky notes, too. So when I go back to the page, it's like the page in a book with my highlights (other people may have highlights, too), my comments and so on. It's really very cool and helps me to pull my thoughts together.

Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

Slides.Diigo.com - Slideshows in a Flash   Want to find an easy way to create slideshows? Then look no further than WebSlides. WebSlides is a Diigos innovation that helps you create useful slideshows. To create a slide show with WebSlides you simple bookmark the links of choice and put them in order by dragging and dropping. Once you have decided on the order of the links you can add audio, either music or narration. The next step is to simply press play and watch your slideshow. Your slideshow will have a unique URL that you can email to friends or post on your webpage or profile page. There is also a highlighting and commenting feature which allows you and others to comment on your slideshow. Click on the Diigo icon to add sticky notes, then others can comment on your notes. If you prefer to keep your notes private, you have that option and you will be the only one to see your comments. Create an interesting slideshow to share with friends.

Why it might be a killer     WebSlides is very easy to use, choosing the order of your bookmarked links by dragging and dropping is great because everyone, no matter how technologically challenged, can handle that. Since your slideshow has a unique URL address it is also easy for you to share you slide show with others. WebSlides can be used by people of al ages and professions, from teenagers trying to spice up their profile page to artists displaying their portfolio.

Check out this quick demo video about Diigo v3 and find out just what it can do. Please note though, this video surprisingly showcased a screen-shot of TechCrunch and not SOMEWHAT FRANK - there must be some sort of mix up. :)  Nonetheless, Diigo v3 is pretty impressive. I like the way that Diigo enables users to create lists of bookmarks that can then be viewed a number of different ways (list views, web slide view, etc). I also like its bookmarking toolset as it offers a number of innovative ways to capture and annotate content.

Interestingly, Ren points out Delicious as the only competitor to his service that’s still innovating. However, it looks like traffic to Delicious is falling off, while StumbleUpon has spiked upward according to Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (click through for the charts). That may mean that the average user is actually interested in a less full-featured service. Around the corner is Delicious 2.0 (coverage on that from TechCrunch), so we’ll soon have a chance to see.

It is my pleasure to be able to present just one of my favorite applications to Liz’s great readers. Liz has always been about putting people together in the most positive way, and innovations like Diigo aim towards people as well. Check this cool tool out when you get the chance and let us and Diigo know what you think.

Web 2.0 was and is about Web innovation. So many startups have focused on everything from video to business applications, and much more. However, the list of startups that actually have practical and/or productive capabilities is still ? rather limited.

The point here is, Diigo is not really a bookmarking site. The essence of this tool is research and secondarily productive community.

using all the function of Diigo’s innovation and refinements, has the ability to help build relationships based around perhaps our greatest asset – knowledge. Facebook, MyBlogLog, Digg and a host of other communities are based

An innovative powerful feature: It allows a group manager to pre-define a set of groups tags as "recommended group tags" to improve group tagging consistency, or as a form of scaffolding to provide models of tags. These "recommended group tags" will automatically show up each time this group is selected in the bookmarking window:

Many possible use scenarios. For example, perfect for teachers to guide students for a more structured group bookmarking activities. Note: special credit to Steve Hargadon of Classroom2.0 for making this feature request!

But honestly, even with their latest release - they have stopped innovating. I checked out Diigo on the recommendation of Mike Fruchter sometime ago via FriendFeed. Since signing up I hadn’t really used it. But, the latest update to delicious broke my Daily Digest series - which was the final straw. And since Diigo allows you to import from Delicious, there really is no switching costs for me. That being said I have been extremely happy with my Diigo experience. Here are six reasons Diigo is better than Delicious

1. It’s more socialDiigo has an extra level of social networking that Delicious does not provide - at least not in a usable manner. You can connect with people that have similar interests based on what you tag. 2. AnnotationsThe annotations feature is very cool. When you bookmark something, you can highlight notable sections to refer to later. And any other Diigo users can see your highlights when they visit the page if they have the toolbar installed. 3. Superior UI and ExperienceAside from all the snazzy features, the core “bookmarks” interface is much better than that of delicious - offering many additional features and better organization. 4. MicrobloggingThe microblogging feature in delicious never got a chance. This is the “daily post” feature that basically posts a digest to your blog of all the bookmarks you have saved over X amount of time. Delicious always had it as an “experimental feature”, for 3 years. Diigo does it so much better, allowing you to post only specific tags to your blog as well as providing more customization features. 5. DiscoveryNow, this is something that delicious did fairly well but is pretty much a product of its large community. But Diigo does a great job at it too, allowing you discover what’s hot across the network but also within a group of friends. It also has a “watchlist” feature that allows you to keep tabs on certain tags in the network. And last, it shows you a river of bookmarks from your network - with a neat tag cloud to see what your community is tagging the most. 6. Better ToolboxYou can import, export. There are widgets, linkrolls, and tagrolls. They offer several ways to interact with the service - through context menu, toolbars, bookmarklets. There’s a Facebook app. You can “save elsewhere” too. So, if you still want to post stuff to delicious (let’s say you have a great community there), you can set that up. What this does is posts your new bookmarks to the other services whenever you post them to Diigo.

All in all Diigo wins hands down. So ditch delicious, sign up, and join me.

However, Diigo is much more important than that to be relegated to a mere service that directs users to the outlandish, latest web page hype. There is a promise of research and community knowledge gathering that doesn't have much use for a Thumb up rating systems. They want to collaborate more intimately than that.

Habituellement Activeille ne s’intéresse qu’aux outils éprouvés et rodés, dont la valeur ajoutée dans le domaine des activités quotidiennes de l’entreprise est vérifiée par un solide retour d’expérience. Les solutions “high tech”, mais à l’avenir incertain, sont plutôt abordées ici. Mais voilà un outil qui vient de sortir en version publique, après six mois de tests privés, et qui est tout à fait remarquable. Il s’agit de Diigo, au nom un peu bizarre, correspondant à l’acronyme “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, qui se présente comme un outil de partage de liens (social bookmarking), mais va bien au-delà. Peu importe la théorie, extrêment riche au demeurant, c’est encore la pratique qui nous intéresse dans ce produit. On peut en faire deux lectures. La première, celle des concepteurs, permet de découvrir une architecture riche qui couvre la gestion des liens, avec de nombreuses possibilités de classement (répertoires, tags), la recherche dans les signets (incluant le texte de la page et les annotations). Le contenu d’une page web peut être sélectionné (en totalité ou partie) et marqué (par soulignement). Cette mise en valeur de paragraphe reste attachée à la page et est rendue visible aux autres membres de la communauté ! J’ai également saisi une note brève.

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.

Diigo: sharing and publishing bookmarks with tags and little comments attached to them is nice, but providing detailed annotations directly onto Web pages is even nicer, and Diigo is definitely leading the pack there. Annotations used to require the use of a dedicated plugin with initial releases of the application, but the company listened to persistent requests from users (including myself), and developed a plugin-free version as well. Definitely worth checking if you consider your bookmarking tool as a real productivity application.

8. Ramon deSilva  |  January 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm Ismael, That was an interesting writeup. You covered a number of sites, and offered useful capsule summaries. I’ve looked over many of the sites you mention, and used del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and Diigo. They are all good sites for bookmarking. But I think you overlooked a few points about Diigo that make it different from, and far superior to, any of the other sites. 1. As well as the ability to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, you can collect the annotations from any set of pages (say, those tagged web-2.0-services) into a single source, with original URLs noted, to simplify your research. 2: The Diigo toolbar allows you to place all the search tools you might want, grouped by purpose, in a single button, so you can easily use multiple search tools for extensive research. The integration of this with bookmarking and annotation capabilities makes Diigo the most full-featured, capable research tool available. Diigo has other abilities; too many to list here. Overall, Diigo will save anyone who spends much time doing research on the Internet time and effort. True, you need to spend a bit of time learning all the features so you can incorporate them into your work habits, but the effort will pay off many times over. Overall, Diigo is the one service I find I cannot live without. There are other tools out there that do a nice job of this or that, and I use some of them. But Diigo is the only one I depend on throughout the day and could not live without.

How many users would like a del.icio.us++ where they can not only bookmark the URL, but also highlight specific parts of the page? Personally, I can’t live without highlighting: it helps me re-read the page, or realize that I’ve seen it before. -Laurent