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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.

I came across this site recently and I can definitely say it has made my browsing experience much more simplified and pleasurable.Diigo is a social annotation site that lets you post sticky notes on a webpage so next time you visit the site you remember something that you would otherwise forget. Just like that post-it-note that you stuck on your computer to remind you of something. Think, you visited Work N Play and added it to your favorites and you didn’t visit the site for a month ( that is rude ) and when you eventually did you forgot something that you wanted to say or write or read on the site. This is where diigo comes in handy.When you find a site and like it or have something you want to do later you can create a sticky post to remind you later, this sticky post stays on that site and you will be able to view it only when you browse the net by signing in to your diigo account. Also you can highlight texts on any site and add a note or remark as well.

Diigo also offers a toolbar which makes this process even simpler. You can sign in from the toolbar and start browsing the internet as you usually do. Whenever you come across a site that you stuck a note onto, it will be displayed. To make it even easier once you post a note or highlight a text on a site, you don’t have to try to remember it as everytime you post a note or highlight a sites text it will be saved under My Bookmarks in the toolbar. So next time just click on My Bookmarks and you can get the list of all the sites that you used a sticky post to. You can import your favorites from your favorites folder as well. I have been using this service for about a week and a half and I am loving it. It has given my aging mind some rest as I don’t have to try to remember some things because Diigo takes care of it for me.

The service has also added a recommendation engine. Since users are constantly saving and tagging web content, Diigo has a huge database of web pages that may feature similar content. So if you like pages about Windows freeware, Diigo probably knows that and when you click on the recommendations feed you should be able to find pages that you'll like.

I have found that it is pushed my research into websites into a broader realm. I like how easy it is to save my favorites. I am able to place highlights on the site as well as sticky notes. I can form groups to share sites and discuss the common goal of the group. I would like to use it as a place to discuss a book that we will be reading. I think it will be a good place for researching the topic and discussing the topic.

Diigo is one of the best tools a student could ever ask for. It helps a student alot because say for example the student is asked to do a research paper and needs the works cited, if he or she forgets to cite something and wants to go back to see where it was that they got the information from, all the student does is type the sentence and Diigo will automatically find the exact website that it is from. Unlike Google or Yahoo, Diigo takes you straight to the website and highlights the sentenced you have typed. Google and Yahoo give you millions of sites which include the same words, or many times just a few of those words and not in order. It is much harder and time consuming to use those sites to look for something. Diigo facilitates the work of people and it also saves you alot of time, which is a great advantage to students considering the fact that they sometimes have more than one assignment to complete.

Diigo is the most useful tool for take-it-with-you research. It not only organizes and tags bookmarks, it also lets you mark up Web pages as you would a paperback book--with sticky notes, highlights, and comments--then share those notes with others.

Robust & Customizable by ForbiddenDonuts on May 14, 2007 (rated 10) An all around excellent tool. While the average user will find it more than capable as a social bookmarking too, its real value lies in the ability to capture, highlight, annotate & share with specific groups of friends and colleagues. The extensive number of features does not inhibit the speed - the search is lightning-fast, which I consider an absolute necessity.

Pure genius! by Xena on April 15, 2007 (rated 10) This is hands-down the most invaluable research tool I have found. I do a lot of research, on a vast majority of topics, and this tool has made my life so much easier. Great job! This is something I cannot live without. It has changed the way I do research, and makes regular bookmarking and tagging obsolete, in my opinion. I love the fact that you can highlight the relevant parts on a page, add sticky notes, forward your information from the context menu, and all of your information is saved. I also love the fact that you can set privacy to default. And that once you install the toolbar (yes, I hate too many toolbars, too)that you can drag and drop the icons you want to other areas, eliminating the space another toolbar would take up. And viewing your information is effortless, with previewing your highlights and notes, without actually having to go to the website. Fantastic, great job, I wish I had found this sooner!