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Diigo: the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife July 24th, 2006 Just as PC World predicted, the bookmarking / social annotation powerhouse known as Diigo announced their public launch today. While others have been quick to launch a legion of bookmarking sites that are all nearly identical to one another, Diigo’s developers have taken the time necessary to produce the most substantive collection of annotation, blogging, and research tools available under one roof. Those who think that Diigo is “just another” bookmarking site are in for a big surprise when they start to explore the real capabilities of this little beast. When I first mentioned Diigo back in February, I stated that my favorite feature was the ability to bookmark across multiple platforms (such as Binklist, Furl, RawSugar, etc.) but what I didn’t realize is that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. “What are these great features?” you’re asking. Let’s take a look at some of them. First of all, the key to unlocking the secret world of Diigo is the toolbar. This tiny piece of software allows the whole of the internet to become an interactive work station. While the toolbar contains the standard bookmarking and search features you would expect, it also allows you to use the real gem of this suite: the Content Selection Menu. The Content Selection Menu is an innocent-looking little drop down menu that appears whenever you highlight some text (this feature can be turned on or off via the options menu on the toolbar.) The menu contains three categories of sub-menus: Diigo, Search, and Copy.

The Diigo sub-menu allows you to highlight selected text or to blog the text with Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, or Typepad. The highlight can be set to either public or private visibility. The private highlighting is particularly useful if you’re doing any sort of research that involves keeping track of bits of information from all over the web. The public highlighting is great for annotating web pages with “sticky notes” that other Diigo users can see when hovering over the highlighted text. One more important feature here is the ability to forward the web page without having to go through the trouble of composing an email to do it. So in one fell swoop you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, and forward without ever having to leave the web page. (One minor correction: the highlighting does not become publicly visible unless a public Sticky Note has been attached.) In the Search sub-menu you will find the ability to search your selected text across a potentially infinite number of search engines and online resources. The stock search menu comes loaded with about ten categories, each containing multiple resources. Whether you want to search a standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo, a blogging resource such as Technorati, News, Shopping, Music, Bookmarking sites, they’re all there, and much more. In addition, the search menu is fully cusomizable. Don’t need a certain category? No problem, just delete it. Want to add you own category? That’s no problem either. You can add, remove, and rearrange ’til your heart’s content. The Copy menu is short and sweet. And I do mean sweet! As much as I love all of the other features Diigo has to offer, this is quite possibly the one “must have” feature that seals the deal for me. This sub-menu has only two offerings: Without format, and With format. Anyone who has needed to cut & paste text from a web site into a blog entry, email, or word processing document should know the frustration of having to unformat the text in order to make it usable in your document. I had gotten to the point of just keeping Notepad open in order to quickly (and I use that term very loosely) unformat text before pasting it into my documents. Now with a single click I can strip the text of its formatting, making it ready to insert into the document of my choice. Like I said…sweet! I could go on and on about the wonders of Diigo, but you really aren’t going to gain a full appreciation for it until you give it try yourself. If all of these features (and I didn’t even cover them all) seem a little overwhelming, don’t worry. There is an extensive help section to guide you through. Why wait for Web 2.0 to come to your favorite sites when you can carry this cutting-edge tool wherever you go? Posted by Reginald Freeman

Ever-since we got a sneak peak at Diigo, I've been playing around with it and marveling at the latest feature releases. Diigo is the product of hardwork, deep understanding of what end users want, and one of the most feature complete social annotation services I know of. Last week, the team at Diigo released some great updates that make it all the better reason to switch from whatever social bookmarking tool you're using, to Diigo. Here's a rough outline of what the team has been up to:Easier to Bookmark: Recent updates allows users to add a 'Diigolet' to their bookmarks; a button that allows you to add whatever page you are viewing to your Diigo bookmarks, an invaluable tool for information hungry users.Importing/Exporting: Badges are the 'hip' thing right now and Diigo doesn't want to miss out on it. So, they will be releasing a linkroll that will allow users to add their recent bookmarks to their blogs or websites to share what they have been bookmarking. You can also import your Del.icio.us bookmarks to your Diigo account.Toolbars: The Diigo toolbar has also been upgraded. You can blog about the page you are viewing with the "Blog-This" button, as well as instantaneously add the page you are viewing to your bookmarks.

Our design philosophy is simple -- what makes the most sense to us as users, what we'd like to have as users ourselves, and what are some creative ways to do things even better... We'd like to continue thinking out-of-the-box, and not to be totally bound by traditional framework or method of doing things.What Diigo has to do is really stick out to users; and that's pretty hard to do when there are a great number of other competing services. That's exactly what Diigo does. For those that are looking for a head-on review, I suggest you take a peak at our initial preview.

Shared bookmarks & web pages – del.icio.us, Shadows, MyWeb, Furl, Diigo

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