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I’ve sung the praises of social bookmarking service Diigo in the past here at Lifeclever. It archives a full cache of every page in case the original goes down, lets you highlight and annotate Web pages, and it publishes your links to all the other social bookmarking sites automatically. What’s not to love? Well, I guess some people are perfectionists, because the team at Diigo has just a launched new and improved version 3 in beta. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and, for my purposes, it offers a few nifty improvements. Tags are listed alphabetically by default, and the Diigo plugin for Firefox offers a “Twitter This” option which sends your link to Twitter as a tinyurl link. The new Diigo also offers spiffy social networking/recommendation functionality, but that’s not my bag, although it may be yours. Either way, there’s really no reason anyone should use the Yahoo’s stagnant Del.icio.us service anymore. Diigo’s much prettier and it runs faster too! Go import your Del.icio.us bookmarks today.

A few weeks back I managed to score an invite to a new social bookmarking/annontation site called diigo. I am quite excited by the potential of a service such as this and its really starting to realise some of the oppourtunity out there. Essentially diigo lets you bookmark pages, tag those bookmarks, add comments to those bookmarks, highlight content within pages, add comments to those pages that are viewable by all diigo users and utilise all the community features your used to like subscribing to your friends lists. Thats not a list of features that springs out of the page, many of these ideas have been attempted previously. Its more the deftness that diigo handles these ideas with that makes it stand out from the pack. Theres also the fact that its all bundled into one service.

the best way to sum up a service like diigo is that it overlays a Web 2.0 service on top of Web 1 sites. Things like tagging, annotation, social bookmarking and social commenting are very Web 2.0 in nature. diigo allows you to apply these ideas to normal Web 1 style sites.

Take, for example the BBC News site. Theres an awfull lot of content on there, some of which I would be interested in the thoughts of others on. Currently only certain, carefully chosen stories feature comments. diigo, however, allows you to comment on these stories, furthermore you can highlight actual pieces of text within the story and comment on them. And then others can view your comments and add their own. It is possible to have a linear conversation based around single web pages or even paragraphs of content. When you take the potential of the above and add in a competant social bookmarking service you can begin to see where diigo is heading as a service. The diigo team are aware that there are numerous other services out there, the one that is certainly a huge obstacle in terms of social bookmarking is del.icio.us, a service that I absolutely love. To make the transition a bit easier you can import your bookmarks into diigo from del.icio.us, you can also automatically add your diigo bookmarks to del.icio.us

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated. Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making presentations out of your saved pages and then sharing them with groups of other users. The slide shows also display text you've highlighted or notes you've taken on bookmarked sites. Unfortunately, you can't test WebSlides yet; only a beta wait list sign-up is available for now. I use Diigo instead of Delicious because it has more research-friendly features, and it can simultaneously save stuff to Delicious, Newsvine, and other services.

Diigo. Takes social bookmarking / social annotation to a whole new level. It’s been written up in Techcrunch and CNet. No point in repeating the good news. How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. CNet One thing about Diigo. One gesture to Diigo can simultaneously update all your other bookmarking sites. That may create a lot of duplication, or it may create the opportunity to connect with others across a world of tagging that remains fragmented. I shall continue experimenting with it.

Diigo: Group Exploration of the Web

Like Del.icio.us, Diigo lets you bookmark and tag pages and store those bookmarks on the Web. And as with Ma.gnolia, you can set up groups of like-minded Web wanderers who share bookmarks. But Diigo, which is free, adds some nifty new features, including the ability to add sticky notes to a page, highlight passages of text, or blog your clippings and notes with just a couple of clicks.

Beta Watch

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!