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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.

DEMOfall: The wisdom of many, many individuals

The center of influence and knowledge gathering, organization, and sharing is shifting from a centralized authority to the many individuals at the edge of the network. In this session, the following companies showed their solutions for these critical knowledge work tasks: Diigo, Inc.: We spoke with Diigo last week while they were preparing for DEMOfall. Diigo combines web highlighting, note-taking, organization and sharing in a very nice package. Enabled by adding a bookmarklet to your browser (all major flavors are supported), Diigo is adding the ability to collect your web clippings into an easily shared WebSlide presentation. There is a Groups feature that allows you to predefine a distribution list for sharing information and the interface is nicely AJAXed to provide drag-and-drop organization of content. Diigo also provides a social network dimension that allows you to search across the public collections shared by other Diigo users to find people with similar interests. You can search by tags or profiles and extend your network to include others who have displayed a similar are of interest to your own. Inviting friends you already have is all well and good but Diigo provides a way to discover new connections in the web clipping sphere.

Diigo builds on the MyStickies concept and fuses it with a social bookmarking system similar to Del.icio.us. The result is the best web-clipping/collaboration/bookmarking/thought-organizing tool out there. Once you've installed Diigo, you'll get a Diigo tool bar at the top of your browser. Diigo also offers a little javascript link you can drag into your links bar that essentially does the same thing without taking up as much room. Using the Diigo tool bar you can highlight text on a web page, add sticky notes, bookmark and tag a page, and see public comments made by other Diigo users.

But the feature that catapults Diigo into the stratosphere in my mind is its ability to search annotations.  If you do any blogging, I'm sure you know why this is such a helpful tool. Now I can annotate facts and figures on web pages and tag them. In the future, when I desperately need references and links for an article, I have a whole database of searchable stickies and bookmarks. When I return to the web pages I've annotated, there are all my notes and highlights. Also, since all of my Diigo data is out in the cloud, I can access it from any computer.