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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.

I recommend Diigo, especially with the plug-in. It's a complex tool but if you take a few minutes to learn what it can do and how it does it, it can make you a more productive, smarter Web user.

There's also a very nice new browser sidebar that shows you a lot of very useful and focused information, including your own latest bookmarks, those from your Diigo friends, and most cleverly, the Diigo users who have also saved information from the page you're visiting as well as the site itself.

lets you clip and save text from Web pages, or just page URLs themselves

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply. (Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

Use Diigo for static pages with useful content. Here are some suggested uses from my own Diigo love affair: Research. Why bother copying and pasting articles you’ll be using in your next paper or presentation when you can add them to a searchable database in one click? Publicity. If you have a blog, podcast, or other promotable work, you’ll want to clip all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. Diigo’s perfect for quickly and easily capturing those mentions for posterity and, since it’s shareable, you can show off your best clips in a snap. Want List. It’s not really a resolution, but I do plan to cut down on my expenditures in 2008, and one way that’s always worked well for me in the past is creating a “want list.” When I see a nifty notebook or gadget or safety razor I want to buy, I add it to the want list with the date. 30 days later, if it still sounds awesome, I’ll buy it. But often my enthusiasm for that nifty cable wrap I saw on Cool Tools has waned and I’ve saved twenty bucks. Lifehacks. Obviously. If you’re like me, you’re constantly gathering tips and advice on productivity and technology from around the Web. Save them here and go over them periodically to see which ones actually worked in practice and which were quickly forgotten. Recipes. Several recipe sites let you aggregate your favorites, but if you get your recipes from multiple sites, you can use Diigo to keep them all in the same place. Blogging. One of the big advantages of a social bookmarking service is the social part. Diigo makes it easy to share your links, post them to your blog, or even do an automatic daily post of links to your site.

What does this tool do: It is (still) most valuable as a tool to save and organize your bookmarks, so you will never lose or forget a saved-site again. But the latest upgrade adds much greater depth to previous versions.

To call Diigo just a bookmark organizer is like calling Ella just a singer. But the truth is that your first and most obvious value will come from Diigo’s ability to store and search out your lost bookmarks like no other free program available. You can also highlight and file short sentences within a URL without saving the entire site. Plus you can search text as well as tags and easily forward your best links on to your friends. If you want additional layers of social networking, note taking, and added research ability, this tool satisfies. But you should plan on a gradual ramp up to proficiency. In order to take full advantage of Diigo, it will take some effort to make it sing for you…but in the meantime, it can sure hum.  

With Diigo, you can Highlight the web and Add sticky notes too. You can also access and search your findings from any computers as well as create groups to pool resources for specific projects.Enticed by all the positive comments from my twitter network and despite being a fan of del.icio.us, I recently decided to give Diigo a try. Last year, I was already looking at Diigo as an alternative to del.icio.us but I am now convinced that del.icio.us and Diigo can really be the perfect partners.After downloading the Diigo toolbar, I transferred all my del.icio.us bookmarks to Diigo but decided to keep both to still be able to consult the bookmark recommendations from my del.icio.us network.I have now set up Diigo to save all bookmarks to del.icio.us too, which was very straight-forward. I discovered that the automatic saves were not possible from del.icio.us to Diigo but saving my bookmarks from Diigo to del.icio.us meant that I did not have alter the tags published on My Languages blog.

I like the fact the each Diigo user has a profile, which makes networking a lot easier and personal. There is also a facility to join groups with similar interests in order to share bookmarks and directly send messages to “friends”. Yours and your friends’ recent bookmarks are listed as well as a list of recent visitors to your profile. The bookmarks can be public, private, tagged and untagged and there is a facility to share them as well as comments about them with friends and different groups.Diigo groups are god to share resources and good practice. They are made up of people who choose to join others who have common interests

The tags can be sorted by my usage and by community usage and are also a way to connect with people with similar interests. Likewise, the reader community for your favourite sites can be checked out easily and this can also be a way to enlarge your circle of “friends”. You can also Subscribe to the most recent bookmarks by tags, sites, or users, which is a great way to keep track of the latest information on topics you are interested in.

NeoArch July 25, 2006 Diigo Criticism Filed under: diigo — NeoArch @ 8:52 am Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares - Mashable* Diigo is being criticized over on Mashable for being just one more social bookmarking site. That’s all well and good. I guess when you create a new social tool you should expect that–unless, of course, you create a good one. And that, my friends, is what Diigo is. So in answer to the who cares question, I offer the following: Who cares? Bloggers. Trust me. I am one. On several blogs. A large part of blogging is just countering other bloggers. It’s sorta like what I am doing now. Who am I kidding? It is what I am doing now. The advantage to bloggers is twofold. First, Diigo allows you to store your notes right on the page of the blog with which you disagree. Second, Diigo has blog functionality that lets you blog right from Diigo. Which is what I am doing now. Tagging and blogging can occur seamlessly. And it allows you to have multiple blogs. Try doing that with the Performancing plugin (which I love.) Who cares? Researchers. They have wanted a tool like this for years. I don’t know how many times I have wanted to put marginalia on a blog like I do my books. Now I can. Others can as well. I am a librarian in an academic institution. Trust me. Researchers will use this. Who cares? Anyone who uses the web. This is the type of tool that has a wide appeal, especially for those who do not already use a social bookmarking service. This one IS better than others. This one DOES offer something others don’t. This one DOESN’T just clip text. This one puts your notes right where you want them. Hey, I realize there is some truth to the Web 2.x hype. Who wants another social site that has a name that sounds like a Star Wars character. Put if you’re going to fault Diigo for anything, fault it for having a stupid name. Don’t fault it for competing in crowded space. It fills a need for many people, just like all the mom and pop Linux distros out there do. It is marketable, as is evidenced by the fact that over 10,000 people signed up for the Diigo Beta test.

You should know about Diigo! Filed under: Uncategorized, Technology, folksonomy, diigo — NeoArch @ 9:09 am To those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, I want to apologize for posting infrequently lately. I have had a couple other projects that I have been working on, plus my Church had vacation Bible school last week. You don’t get much done during VBS week. I just wanted to take the time to inform you about a new social bookmarking service. For those of you who already have one, you’re probably groaning, “Not another one!” I know. I know. I have been using Del.icio.us for…well…forever. I can’t remember life before Del.icio.us. In fact, I have no intentions on ceasing from using Del.icio.us. (With Diigo and its toolbar, I don’t have to, but more on that in another post.) For those of you who don’t have a social bookmarking service…well…you need one. Social bookmarking is a way to keep track of all of the websites that you visit. It allows you to describe the page using several one word “tags.” For example, if you visited the page for “Talladega Nights,” you might tag it as “movie,” “Will_Ferrell,” “stupid,” and “NASCAR.” This may seem like a useless service until you cannot find that page with the thing that you needed for your job and now you’re gonna get fired cause you can’t produce what you said you could. Or perhaps you can’t find that online add for that ring for your wife that you saw that would save you $1000 so now you can’t get a new johnboat because you don’t have the extra $$$$ you would have saved. Trust me. You need one. There are several out there. Diigo is different, though. The service is only in beta testing at this point, so you have to actually request an invitation to participate. Diigo not only lets you save a bookmark to the page, but it also allows you to highlight content. It lets you add virtual sticky notes to the page. This really is the ideal tool for research and blogs. You can access your thoughts about a certain web page from anywhere in the world, right on the web page. How many times have you wished that blogs and webpages worked like books. You wish that you could add marginalia. You wish that the marginalia could be either public or private. It’s all possible with Diigo.

Don’t just take my word for it. Go try out Diigo’s playground for yourself. If you don’t think the service is the coolest thing since Cocoa Pebbles (it’s like cereal, only chocolaty), then walk away from your keyboard, go get in your 1973 Ford Maverick, throw in your favorite Captain and Tenille 8-track, and …well… you get the picture. I have just started using Diigo in the past few days, so I will have more to say about it later. However, I do think that this is one of the best social bookmarking sites that I have used. Long live Diigo!