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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.

Recently, I found another very useful function for Diigo, and that is having it aid me in my study of the Spanish language. I am trying to brush up on my skills in time for a job interview, and am meeting with a friend each week to discuss an article (in Spanish) that we have both read. I am using the Diigo comment tool to translate any words in the passage I don't know. That way, when I reread the text, I don't have to rely on the translation, but can refer to it if needed. It is so convenient, and I can't wait to learn more Spanish using Diigo. Has anyone else found that Diigo has aided them in other ways? Are there other cool features I should know about?

I am thoroughly enjoying using Diigo for educational purposes. I don't think I will really get into sharing my articles and comments until I have more friends on there, and figure out how to use it so that only they can see my comments. But I love setting it to private and using the highlight, bookmark and comments features to read online for my classes.