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Slides.Diigo.com - Slideshows in a Flash   Want to find an easy way to create slideshows? Then look no further than WebSlides. WebSlides is a Diigos innovation that helps you create useful slideshows. To create a slide show with WebSlides you simple bookmark the links of choice and put them in order by dragging and dropping. Once you have decided on the order of the links you can add audio, either music or narration. The next step is to simply press play and watch your slideshow. Your slideshow will have a unique URL that you can email to friends or post on your webpage or profile page. There is also a highlighting and commenting feature which allows you and others to comment on your slideshow. Click on the Diigo icon to add sticky notes, then others can comment on your notes. If you prefer to keep your notes private, you have that option and you will be the only one to see your comments. Create an interesting slideshow to share with friends.

Why it might be a killer     WebSlides is very easy to use, choosing the order of your bookmarked links by dragging and dropping is great because everyone, no matter how technologically challenged, can handle that. Since your slideshow has a unique URL address it is also easy for you to share you slide show with others. WebSlides can be used by people of al ages and professions, from teenagers trying to spice up their profile page to artists displaying their portfolio.

At the University of South Florida, Prof. Sherman Dorn is using Diigo, a social annotations tool, to guide students through the legalese. His shared notes can tell students what to linger over, or skip; imagine the time they can save on their reading. Diigo, which lets you "collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere," is also in use at other schools. Developers claim a unique mix of features. Check out a video demo.

Denise Olson from Family Matters and Moultrie Creek commented about her Genealogy Research Resources at Diigo.  I finally visited, registered at Diigo, and joined Denise's group.  Once I joined, I was amazed at all of the resource links Denise has accumulated.  As of this morning, there are 624 bookmarks and usually multiple links within each bookmark.  It's too early in the morning, and I haven't had enough coffee, to focus enough and count all the links, but take my word for it - there are lots. 

All of the bookmarks are tagged by general subject so it's easy to find the your area of interest.  The best part of Diigo and the Genealogy Research Resources group is it's a collaborative environment - if you have some unique resource links you can add them to the group so everyone can make use of them.  I think this is an incredible site, and Denise has put great effort into creating and adding most of the current links. 

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.

The Good: The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers. Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation. The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad: A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion: Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.

Here’s how to set up Related Articles links using Diigo. First, you will need to use a blogging platform that allows you to include RSS feeds within your posts. I use WordPress - the installed version, not the hosted one - and a plugin called inlineRSS.

Each entry includes a friendly name (which you’ll use later in your blog post), a comma, the URL of the feed that you copied from Diigo, another comma and the number of minutes between refreshes. I’ve got mine set to check for new additions to the list every 60 minutes. Now, go to your blog post and enter the following code at the point where you want the feed list to be displayed: That’s it!

DEMOfall: The wisdom of many, many individuals

The center of influence and knowledge gathering, organization, and sharing is shifting from a centralized authority to the many individuals at the edge of the network. In this session, the following companies showed their solutions for these critical knowledge work tasks: Diigo, Inc.: We spoke with Diigo last week while they were preparing for DEMOfall. Diigo combines web highlighting, note-taking, organization and sharing in a very nice package. Enabled by adding a bookmarklet to your browser (all major flavors are supported), Diigo is adding the ability to collect your web clippings into an easily shared WebSlide presentation. There is a Groups feature that allows you to predefine a distribution list for sharing information and the interface is nicely AJAXed to provide drag-and-drop organization of content. Diigo also provides a social network dimension that allows you to search across the public collections shared by other Diigo users to find people with similar interests. You can search by tags or profiles and extend your network to include others who have displayed a similar are of interest to your own. Inviting friends you already have is all well and good but Diigo provides a way to discover new connections in the web clipping sphere.

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again  Annotated New feature from Diigo (currently in private beta testing): create a slideshow of links with highlighting and sticky notes. You can record audio or add music to accompany it. I could see this having potential for basic tutorials or demos; you could do this instead of using screencast or recording software.

We received a nice exclusive from Diigo the social bookmarking beta about their latest release WebSlides. This innovation is a browser based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes and highlights in an interactive slideshow. With this cool tool users can record and narrate tracks as well as add background music to make compelling shows - and somewhat more. WebSlides is being presented at the Office 2.0 Conference as I write this, so we wanted you to have a look at this simple, innovative and useful tool as well......

Interestingly, Ren points out Delicious as the only competitor to his service that’s still innovating. However, it looks like traffic to Delicious is falling off, while StumbleUpon has spiked upward according to Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (click through for the charts). That may mean that the average user is actually interested in a less full-featured service. Around the corner is Delicious 2.0 (coverage on that from TechCrunch), so we’ll soon have a chance to see.

Every so often you come across a service that really fits into your life. Diigo is that for me. I never understood what the excitement was over sites like delicious. I never saw any practical use for it. However, I see many uses for Diigo. A big one for me is how you are able to use it as a research and knowledge tool and how it will allow me to be more time efficient. For one of my freelancing jobs, we talk a lot over email since we are all over the country. I hate when I find a cool article and then I have to send it to each person (I am still trying to figure out how to make email lists on Gmail). This service would allow me to bookmark the article and each person on my team can then decide if it pertains to them (instead of me trying to figure that out). You can set up different groups too. My personal group wouldn’t have to wade through my work bookmarks. Another feature that I love is that you can highlight articles and leave notes for yourself. Currently, I have a ton of bookmarks that I did, and I can’t remember what was important in those articles and why I bookmarked them. When doing research, I would love to be able to note that I have already looked at different web pages.

On the more personal side, there are several features that are just fun to play with. First, you have People Like Me. That feature will show you what other people who have bookmarked the same site as you also bookmarked. It will also suggest people that are close to you in your bookmarking behavior. You are able to import your bookmarks from other sites, so you don’t have waste your time doing that again.

It is a tad overwhelming at first when you are trying to figure it all out. However, it is worth your time.

Once I got it working, it wasn’t so bad. I enjoyed being able to read the feedback from my classmates. I also liked being able to post my own thoughts and/or questions. I still haven’t figured out the difference between a sticky note versus a bookmark and highlighting. For educational purposes it’s a great tool. If I were teaching high school level I would definitely have considered using this tool. As a future elementary school teacher I could use it with fellow co workers and articles I come across.

Diigo has yet to be widely publicized, but I think it will become more popular over time. Annotating in college is important and can be helpful to students in being able to read others thoughts or understanding of the material.

Web bookmarking and research tool Diigo is announcing the launch of Diigo 3.0 today. We initially reviewed Diigo when they launched at DEMO 2007. Diigo is a bookmark tool but what I like about Diigo is their WebSlides feature. It basically makes a live PowerPoint-like annotated presentation using media from across the Web. Back in September I thought the tool was perfect for Web agencies, and I stand by this claim today. One of the new features of Diigo 3.0 is collaborative research. Team members can bring together links they find across the Web for comments and annotation. There is tagging and sticky notes that the team can participate in to make the presentation stronger. The other major update is the addition of more social components. If you install the Diigo toolbar, as you browse the Web, you can see what others think of the page including comments, who bookmarked the page and what other similar sites and pages they have bookmarked. It's all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.

Diigo has released v 3.0 of its browser plugin and has set a new standard in social bookmarking in the process. It not only allows you to bookmark and save notes in an easy to retrieve place, it adds a new dimension to the Web itself by revealing, at the page level, the community of people who have also interacted with the content. It also feeds into a bigger community of content that builds a social network around relevant information. It combines research and community.

Starting simple: You can bookmark and annotate relevant things that you need to reference later. Using the Webslides function, you also can share these links as a slideshow, which actually appear as “live” web pages. The slideshow is embeddable on Web pages and in blogs. Revealing a new layer of the web: The new sidebar gives you quick access to your bookmarks as well your annotations on each Web page. It also shows you other diigo users who have annotated that page to give you additional perspective. The sidebar is searchable to find your notes quicker and easier. Connect and Engage: According to the company, you are what you annotate. Bookmarks, tags, and annotations are one of the best representations of your interests and expertise. At Diigo, you maintain a bookmarks page which is your hub to relevant content. You can also connect to like-minded people and also browse their activities as they relate to you.

In preparation for our talk at SXSW and eBook, we’ve been compiling info on our blogging practices and favorite web apps. I have to say, one of the most useful and robust tools we use right now is Diigo. We use Diigo for TrackSuit CEO and for our corporate clients, we also use it for our personal bookmarking. I think our entire team has switched from Del.icio.us to Diigo, and not in a show of solidarity, but out of sheer convenience.

Diigo builds on the MyStickies concept and fuses it with a social bookmarking system similar to Del.icio.us. The result is the best web-clipping/collaboration/bookmarking/thought-organizing tool out there. Once you've installed Diigo, you'll get a Diigo tool bar at the top of your browser. Diigo also offers a little javascript link you can drag into your links bar that essentially does the same thing without taking up as much room. Using the Diigo tool bar you can highlight text on a web page, add sticky notes, bookmark and tag a page, and see public comments made by other Diigo users.

But the feature that catapults Diigo into the stratosphere in my mind is its ability to search annotations.  If you do any blogging, I'm sure you know why this is such a helpful tool. Now I can annotate facts and figures on web pages and tag them. In the future, when I desperately need references and links for an article, I have a whole database of searchable stickies and bookmarks. When I return to the web pages I've annotated, there are all my notes and highlights. Also, since all of my Diigo data is out in the cloud, I can access it from any computer.

Diigo has no awkward periods to parse. Diigo can suck up my bookmarks from some of the browsers I use. I can highlight sections of a web page and add comments about them on sticky notes. I can forward individual bookmarks with my highlighted sections to others.

I have added a Diigolet button on my bookmark bar on all but one of my browsers. (There's also a Diigo toolbar, but I'm reluctant to give up real estate in my browser.) Diigo will allow me to export its bookmarks into my Del.icio.us, Furl, etc. accounts without any fuss. I can keep selected bookmarks private or add private comments to my public bookmarks -- this is perfect for stashing account information! I'm going to give Diigo a try.

I absolutely loved using Diigo.  After catching on, I found myself constantly wanting to highlight and sticky note something.  I think I added more personal thoughts to the readings than I would had I just printed them out and read them on paper.  Maybe it’s because these were pretty interesting articles, but I definitely made more connections than I normally do.  Usually, I struggle finding anything to say, or I’m too lazy to write annotations in the almost non-existent margins.  I was a little hesitant about Diigo, initially.  And, to be honest, I did not download the toolbar, because, well…I’m quite content with my present toolbar and I didn’t want to alter it.  But, I decided to use the Diigolet and that works great.  All I need to do is highlight whatever text I find intersting and I can make as many sticky notes as I want.  The only issue I had was re-starting the Diigolet everytime I loaded another page - I guess it doesn’t remain open from page to page?  Still, a very fun tool.