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Annotation - Content Highlighting and Notes The key feature of Diigo is annotation. Users can bookmark a page and highlight text and images on the page to take note of. Highlights on a page by the user will then save and appear as a blue dashed underline whenever they visit the site again. Hovering over a highlight will bring up a menu where the user can optionally add a note to the highlight and make the note private or public. Highlighted text with notes attached to them will appear as a solid underline in blue. Also, if you browse to a site that other Diigo users have highlighted or added notes to, you will see their highlights on the page (if saved publicly) colored in orange. Being able to bookmark and annotate a page is very helpful. In terms of research, you can bookmark and annotate all the sites related to the topic you are researching. When your done getting all the information you need, select all the bookmarks in the “My Bookmarks” area and select in the top right drop down, “Extract highlights.” This will then grab all your notes from all the sources you’ve saved and display them on a clean page for you to look over and print. This is a great tool for bloggers as well. Gather up all your sources for a post your working on, add your notes, and when ready, select all the bookmarks and blog about it using Diigo’s built in blogging tool (explained below). Blogging I personally prefer blogging straight through my WordPress installation, but for those of you that want to take notes, gather sources, and easily publish a post to your blog, Diigo may be your solution. Diigo allows you to add multiple blogs to your account, verify them, and easily publish a post, however you may only publish and cannot manage old entries. What I like is that while you browse the web and you come across a site talking about a specific topic you want to expand on, you can right click and select, “Blog This,” which will then direct you to the blogging area where you can write your post along with that site being your source. The other method is by simply going to your bookmarks section and selecting a bookmark, or multiple bookmarks, that you want to write about and then selecting the “Blog This” option from the top right drop down menu. All the sources, highlighted text, and notes will be included in the post document, which you can easily remove if needed, ready for you to write. It’s not an entire blogging platform, just a simple publishing tool that works. Browser Toolbar and Bookmarklet The Diigo toolbar, available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, brings most of Diigo’s features right to your browser. The toolbar allows you to easily bookmark websites, highlight and note pages, search documents for keywords, search terms in a page using your favorite search engine, and it even brings all bookmarks right to the toolbar. The toolbar also is what makes it possible for you to see highlighted text and notes that you and other users have made on websites you visit. Bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking the Diigo button and filling in the tags and highlighting just involves you highlighting the text you want to save. One of my favorite features is the “QuickD” button (not in the above screenshot) that I recently came across. The QuickD button allows you to save a bookmark to Diigo with one click without needing the original Diigo popup to appear and adds a default tag to it (you may also fill in tags in the search box of the toolbar to tag it) so you can just click and go. What if you don’t want to install an extension to your browser? That’s fine because Diigo also provides it’s user with Diigolet, a browser bookmarklet that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate any website as well as view annotations on pages left by other Diigo users.

Features of Diigo As a personal research tool, you can use Diigo to, Bookmark, highlight texts and add sticky notes to any websites that you want. All changes are persistent - that means you can see the same highlighted texts when you are browsing through the same page again.

As a collaborative research platform, you can use Diigo to, Join or create a private or public group to share and collaborate with people of the same interests. Add private sticky notes that are visible to only members of the same group. This creates a platform for instant discussion (or debate!)

Group a web page with tags and lists. Access all your research anywhere because all your bookmarks are stored online. Search for a bookmark by a full text search, sticky notes, tags and more. Share your research with others in multiple ways - send to blog, linkrolls, tagrolls, by email, post to other social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc. Automatically post findings to your blog with all the comments, highlights, etc. Easily find the most popular content on Diigo to stay up to date with the hottest news. Get recommended content based on your activities in Diigo. Get related content while browsing the Internet - I recently stumbled a website with loads of useful comments from Diigo’s users. Import bookmarks from other social bookmarking sites to Diigo. The “Save Elsewhere ” feature allows you to simultaneously bookmark sites to Del.ico.us, Simpy or Ma.gnolia.

Group tag - to enforce tagging consistency within a group, the group admin can set a list of recommended tags to be used by other team members. Get recommended news from your Diigo’s friends - from Diigo’s sidebar, you can also see who is currently reading the same page too!

Extract comments / notes by other users on a website.

After testing Diigo for a while, I love the fact that Diigo maintains all the annotations and comments that I’ve previously left on a web page, which speeds up future revisions on all of my previous findings. Furthermore, there are many specific public groups to join that will definitely help to expand my knowledge.

Diigo, in my opinion, is not only an online research tool; it is a living knowledge sharing community.