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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.

Diigo: Bookmarking evolved August 1, 2006 6:39 PM PDT There's yet another new bookmarking utility live now: Diigo. This one is different. In addition to letting you bookmark pages and share those bookmarks with others, it also lets you highlight parts of pages (text or images), and store those highlight not just in your Diigo account but on the Web pages themselves (if you have the plug-in). You can also attach post-it-like notes to your highlights on Web pages, and they can be private or shared. Old-timers may recollect one of the first Web annotation services, ThirdVoice. That tool also let you mark up any Web page you visited, so that other ThirdVoice users could see what everybody had to say. The service died in a firestorm of controversy, but we've evolved since then -- what people used to call graffiti we now call interactivity and community. The annotation capability sets Diigo apart from Del.icio.us and makes it a more granular data gathering tool, like ClipMarks. Diigo lets you take your clips and do useful things with them: You can publish them all as a Web page, or directly to a blog, or send them in emails. With the Diigo toolbar installed, you can also easily mark parts of any Web page and forward them directly via email. It's a handy and universal "send this article" function, and the highlighting tool makes it much easier to add context. 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? Diigo has very useful annotation and organizational features, though, and if want good way to mark up the Web for personal use or a fast way to send clips to people you know, it's worth checking out. See also JetEye. There's also a nice review of Diigo on SolutionWatch. Posted by Rafe Needleman

  Top 5 Bookmarking Applications – Jots tops the group Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Jots won the race for the top bookmarking site, followed closely by Simpy, Diigo, Del.icio.us and digg.

per the views registered here at NEO Binaries.

Diigo also supports my own metacognition as I come across web pages that have been annotated by my Diigo network

Contributors to this article: Demetri Orlando, Sarah Hanawald, Beth Ritter-Guth, Michèle Drechsler

strategies to encourage metacognition