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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.

Annotation is Suddenly Fun Each semester, I try (in vain, usually) to get my students to annotate their text book. I do this to prepare them not only for future studies, but also for the annotation that research demands they do. Diigo, suddenly, makes the students want to annotate their bookmarks. It is their chance to make sure the world (or their group) knows how important specific words on a webpage are to them.

Diigo allows a More Advanced Conversation As I mentioned above, social bookmarking allows students to engage in a conversation with other scholars on the same topic. Diigo allows this conversation to move beyond just the “Read this” comment and actually allows the students to create a dialogue. Through Diigo, students have a variety of ways to engage in this dialogue. Creating Groups–creating groups of individuals within their network who are researching on the same topic allows students to share bookmarks they have found. Using Forums–Within a group, the administrator has the opportunity to create a forum that allows each member of the group to ask and respond to specific issues on a topic. For example, if one student cannot find statistics, they can mention this in the forum and receive an answer (or better yet, a bookmark) from one of the group members. Highlighting–This allows one student to specifically show others in the group what they find important about the bookmark. But the highlights are not owned or seen by just the individual. If John shares a bookmark with highlighting, Frank can not only see John’s highlighting, but can also add his own highlighting (which is also available to John). Sticky Notes–In addition to highlighting, students can add to the conversation on the page. Their comments can be seen by others who read the page (if the notes are public) and their friends can add to this conversation.

Then I found Diigo, and suddenly Delicious didn’t look so good anymore. Diigo is another social bookmarking service (and one we’ve covered before), offering all of Delicious’ relevant features and much more. I left Delicious, and haven’t ever looked back. There are a lot of things I love about Diigo, but there are seven features that sold me on using Diigo for all my bookmarking needs. These are all in addition to the features I deem non-negotiable for social bookmarking sites- tagging, Firefox extensions, looking at popular bookmarks, etc.

1. Highlighting

2. Saving Pages is Easier Than Ever, Regardless of Browser

If you’re using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Flock, the Diigo toolbar has all the features you could want - bookmark, search, highlight, and organize all your Web pages right from the toolbar. If you’re not into those browsers, though there’s a great bookmarklet that lets you do most of that with any browser. I use Chrome, and all the functionality I need is built right into the bookmarklet. Delicious becomes more difficult to use outside of Firefox (there are bookmarklets, but they pale in comparison), and Diigo keeps on working fine.

3. Functional Commenting and Real Conversations

This is one of my favorite features of Diigo - when you’re reading a page, you can make comments right on the page, that show up as speech bubbles. If another Diigo user comes across the page, they’ll be able to see your comment. You can see (in the Firefox sidebar) who’s reading a page you’re on, who’s talking about it, and a real conversation can happen - unlike in Delicious, when all you can see is someone’s bookmarks.

4. Send Bookmarks to Facebook or Twitter with one click

With one click, you can send a Diigo bookmark to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog. It truly takes one click, from “Send” to the service you want to use. If you want to send bookmarks to Facebook, you’ll have to install the Diigo Facebook app. You can also have Diigo create a daily digest of your latest bookmarks and send it to your blog, which I’d debate the usefulness of, but the functionality is there. Being able to bookmark a site on Twitter in particular straight from Diigo is big for me, and makes Twitter easier and quicker to use.

5. Sites Help You Find Deeper Cuts

When you bookmark a page with Diigo, it bookmarks more than just the link (like those other sites). It bookmarks the entire page you were on, which has two great implications. First, it means you can preview sites within the Diigo page. You can view your bookmarked page, without ever leaving Diigo. It also means that you can search the full text of pages you bookmark.

Your bookmarks live in Diigo, so if a site goes down or is unavailable, you can still find it in Diigo, as well as search and view it. Diigo’s become a social-bookmarking machine, and I left Delicious and never looked back. If you want to make the switch, you can import your bookmarks from most other services- making the switch is so easy, there’s no reason not to! Diigo’s the new gold standard in social bookmarks. Do you use social bookmarking services? Which one? What are the killer features that make you use the one you’ve got?

I’m a big YouTube fan, but there are way more videos than I can possibly figure out. With “Sites“, you’re able to go through a particular site (including MakeUseOf) and find out what other people are bookmarking and reading about. You can create a watchlist, and whenever someone bookmarks a page from that site, you see it. It’s a great way to find popular and cool stuff in big, content-full sites that you might not notice otherwise.

6. Simultaneously bookmark things to Diigo and Elsewhere - even Delicious! If you have a Ma.gnolia, Delicious, or Simpy account that you want to hold on to for posterity, you can set up Diigo to simultaneously bookmark pages to Diigo and to your other service, using the “Save Elsewhere” feature. I like this because it means you can use the vastly superior Diigo, but for all four different services. Just enter your account info, and you can start bookmarking all over the Web, with one click!

7. Bookmark and Search Entire Web Pages

I seem to always bookmark a page, and then come back to it later and forget what it was that I cared about on the page

No more searching through the page again to find what it was you cared about.