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Hands-on Diigo: bookmarking evolved By Rafe Needleman – August 1, 2006,

It took me a while to grok Diigo, though. There's a lot going on here, and like a Swiss Army Knife, there are blades that new users will find confusing. What's a customizable search bar doing here? And why does Diigo act so much like a social bookmarking tool--do we really need another one of these?

but we've evolved since then--what people used to call "graffiti" we now call "interactivity" and "community."

Diigo To Launch WebSlides At TechCrunch40 Posted in Ajax News by Duncan Riley on the September 14th, 2007 Research megatool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides for RSS feeds and Bookmarks feature at TechCrunch40 next week. The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also allows any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To use WebSlides, users enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow. There’s a lot of competition in this space, but having looked at the product I can see why Diigo qualified for the demo pit at TC40. A widget that includes full content including advertising is a good thing for publishers, and it’s the first slide/ widget I’ve seen that does this. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities it makes for a great product. Video demonstration is below.

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.

But when it comes to online research and collaboration, are the usual social bookmarking services really the best possible tool for organizing that flood of online information? If you've bookmarked the same website several times over, or misplaced an important bookmark among a hundred others in your list that share the same tag, the limitations of tagging as an organization tool will be clear. And if you're like me, sometime you'll find a certain bookmark easily enough, only to discover that you can't remember precisely which single sentence it was that made you bookmark the page in the first place!

Diigo.com takes social bookmarking to a new level of usefulness.

For research and writing collaboration, in particular, I'm finding all of this a real time-saver.  Normally, for example, you might point your colleague to a social-bookmarked page you'd like them to read — but then you'll often need to take the time to explain its significance in a separate phone call, chat message or email.

Diigo has released v 3.0 of its browser plugin and has set a new standard in social bookmarking in the process. It not only allows you to bookmark and save notes in an easy to retrieve place, it adds a new dimension to the Web itself by revealing, at the page level, the community of people who have also interacted with the content. It also feeds into a bigger community of content that builds a social network around relevant information. It combines research and community.

Starting simple: You can bookmark and annotate relevant things that you need to reference later. Using the Webslides function, you also can share these links as a slideshow, which actually appear as “live” web pages. The slideshow is embeddable on Web pages and in blogs. Revealing a new layer of the web: The new sidebar gives you quick access to your bookmarks as well your annotations on each Web page. It also shows you other diigo users who have annotated that page to give you additional perspective. The sidebar is searchable to find your notes quicker and easier. Connect and Engage: According to the company, you are what you annotate. Bookmarks, tags, and annotations are one of the best representations of your interests and expertise. At Diigo, you maintain a bookmarks page which is your hub to relevant content. You can also connect to like-minded people and also browse their activities as they relate to you.

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.