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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!

Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation: the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed. Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments. The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo. The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page wisely noted: Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick. This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available. On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference. All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services. My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community. Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you. Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article. There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities. The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice. Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools 11.13.2006 @ 11:07 AM — Filed under: Social Bookmarking

Diigo, "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff", the web2.0 social bookmarks and annotation service, has finally announced going public today!*I've been waiting for this to write about it, well here it goes:Diigo is a great, no, a fantastic tool(!) Not only for bookmarking but also for research, blogging and a must for any social bookmark mania. It's a kind if mix between del.icio.us (social bookmarks), Wizlite (web highlight and notes), Onlywire (multi post to social bookmarks), with Blogging support. Diigo vs Flock: In fact, there are some similarities with Flock, the web 2.0 browser, though you can install Diigo on Flock you'll get some close features, like: blogging: They both support WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and MovableType for now (+Dupral for Flock) exempt that Diigo, instead of a blog editor, uses the online blog editor.+ In flock you can save your post for later, in Diigo you can clip the text you want and blog from your bookmarks later on. (See an example, select all and expand to see what I mean.) Bookmarking: Both have a one click bookmark. Flock can sync and bookmark to Shadows and deli.cio.us. Diigo's, called QuickD, let's you set a custom tag and also can simultaneous bookmark to: de.licio.us, BlinkList, Furl, Netvouz, RawSugar, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo, locally... and of course at Diigo! Search: They both have good search but very different. Flock can search though bookmarks, history, the web and add search plugins like in Firefox. Else Diigo let's you completely customize, add search engines and display them in one or more dropdown menus on the toolbar. (For example, I customized a part of mine for searching though social bookmarks: digg, del.icio.us popular, Netvouz, Hatena...and the same menu that will search my bookmarks.) And at the Diigo website there's an in-page pop-up advanced search which let's you search tags, url, title, phrase, in comments, in highlight or anywhere for only user's or community bookmarks.So using both, Diigo AND Flock, makes you someone very very... social!? ;-)Highlighting:This is the main interesting feature in Diigo.You may not have the Flock's RSS reader support*, nor the drag and drop Flickr or PhotoBucket toolbars but you can Clip text and images, Highlight, Web notes and Aggregate the clippings. Aggregating clippings lets you collect text on the web and later view them all on one page, very useful for research and blogging. See the screenshot. Diigo's highlighting styles Other special features: A bookmark status icon on the toolbar shows if the page has been bookmarked by you, has been commented by any Diigo user or both.Tag cloud which is also a batch tag manager. [Screenshot]Batch selected: Set the selected bookmarks to public/private, mark as read/un-read, expand details or delete them. Quick access: A customizable drop down menu to quickly access any bookmarks of a certain tag. Forward: Email link AND clipping. (usually it's just the link.)Highlight: Search terms like the Google toolbar but also possible on bookmarks and inside non expanded clippings.Tagging: They can be comma OR space separated!Delete: This is a small detail and would be better shown in a video but I love it: When you delete a bookmark it 'flies out' and disappears with a zooming effect! ...and of course it's a one click delete. + all the usual features, and not so usual features like: import directly from browser bookmarks and del.icio.us, follow a tag, user or search results, RSS links, Unicode support, an Ajax linkroll generator and much more... This without mentioning what's comming up! (API included!)As you see, they have done many updates since they started in Decamber. If you want to see more there's a recent review by John from Libraryclips and very good and complete help pages with screen-shots at Diigo.Note: The toolbar exists for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock, but incase you find yourself in an internet cafe, there's also an in-page bookmarklet for bookmarking. All the rest, annotation, blogging... comes with it's the toolbar.I've used, and still use now, the Diigo toolbar along many other extensions, where in the beginning it did have some compability problems, it's been a while I haven't had any.*I want to apologise to all the diigo team for the other day with a special thanks to Maggie Tsai for her kind understanding and reaction. -Some of you may know what it is, if you don't I won't tell you. (><") ::Shame::

Diigo: Social Bookmarking and More... By Tim Lauer on January 6, 2006. Discuss it below Diigo is a new social annotation/bookmarking tool. In one respect it is similar to del.icio.us. It even takes advantage of the del.icio.us API so that items that you tag or bookmark with Diigo, are also tagged to your del.icio.us account. Where it is quite different from del.icio.us, is that you can also more fully annotate your bookmarked pages, and bookmarks can also be saved locally. You can highlight and tag specific images and paragraphs from web pages, and also add sticky notes. These sticky notes can be public or private. For example if I tag and add a sticky note to a page, I can also see other sticky notes left by others or I can send a notification to a colleague so that she can read my annotation and respond. I can also use Diigo to save my selections and annotations and review them later. I can also forward them on via email. The Diigo toolbar puts all of these tools at your disposal. The Flash Tutorial gives a very good overview. The more I play with Diigo the more it looks like an interesting alternative/compliment to del.icio.us. Technorati Tags: del.icio.u