Diigo Community

However, we like the way Fytch has implemented their service - a bookmarklet! Finally, a company that thinks the browser itself is the future, not another downloadable app.

A Guide to Annotating using Diigo

by José Picardo

5 days ago: Tue, Sep 22, 2009

Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo - TTT165 - 08.26.09

by Paul Allison

September 22nd, 2009

Besides simply tagging and storing bookmarks online, Diigo seems to offer a couple of unique features focused on the idea of annotation and collaboration. Diigo's power comes from the Diigo toolbar. With the toolbar, a user can quickly access stored bookmarks tagged as "Links" (or other tags by simply changing the filter) via a traditional folder. From this toolbar, searches can be executed across all bookmarks, blog search engines, or any incredible number of sources of interests such as Movie/TV or Shopping. There is also a one-click access to your "Inbox" on the toolbar - essentially allowing real-time access to tags you are trying to track.

To use the highlight and find feature, you just type in the textbox that you use for normal searching but this time either click on the button for each word of the search term or the highlighter button. It sounds like a lot involved with the toolbar, but really once you start to use it, you will grow to love it. I mentioned that Diigo is not only a social bookmarking service, but also a social annotation service. Diigo lets you highlight any text on any site and bookmark the page saving the highlighted text. Once the bookmark is saved, the next time you visit the bookmarked page, you will still see the text you highlighted, but this time with a blue underline. You can save multiple highlights on a page and even save sticky notes to each highlighted text area that you saved. This is excellent because there are many times that I have wanted to keep a note of something specific on a site and couldn’t and later on forget why I bookmarked it in the first place. Now I can keep notes on pages so I know what I was thinking at the time. On top of all of this though is that you can set public sticky notes. Meaning that when a Diigo user is to set a note to public on a page, any other Diigo user will see the note as well when viewing it. I also should note that in order to save a public note, you must have atleast two friends to help cut down on abuse with notes on sites. Diigo has many other great features. One feature that caught my eye was the importing of bookmarks. Instead of importing a saved file to Diigo, it will actually open a popup listing all your bookmarks from your browser and let you import each on all at once or individually. It also tags them all by default using the tag, “Links” along with the name of the folder it was found in from your bookmarks directory. This is great because I don’t have to make any file or anything to import bookmarks. Another feature that I thought was interesting search page for Diigo. Diigo has searching in the interface itself, but unlike other services, it also has its own search page that lets anyone search Diigo (even if you aren’t a member). Instead of showing results in the Diigo’s website itself, it will show results on a page in a format much like Google’s which makes it a whole lot better, in my opinion. Another feature that Diigo has is friends. You can add friends to your bookmarks page so you can easily view their bookmarks when you want.

Now I can use this new tool without really forgetting to bookmark the same links to my old bookmarking site as well. For my I do them at Del.icio.us and my bookmarks will be registered there while I am using Diigo. So if you want to give this service a try without loosing anything, this is the way to go. Configuration is simple as well!

Diigo: Another Del.icio.us? by Jason Hahn Diigo (pronounced “deego”) is a brand new social annotation site.  Social annotation is “a superset of social bookmarking,” the site (www.diigo.com) says.  It is similar to del.icio.us in that it is a social bookmarking tool, and even uses the del.icio.us API to give users the ability to simultaneously tag sites on both their Diigo and del.icio.us accounts. The key differentiation between Diigo and del.icio.us is in the specialized annotation features of Diigo.  Users can highlight specific paragraphs or images on a page and post either public or private sticky notes that can be shared with other users who can choose to respond to your sticky notes.  These annotations can be saved for later review and can also be forwarded through e-mail. This further capability and functionality of specialized annotation features is primarily achieved through the Diigo toolbar.  The toolbar allows the user to search through numerous resources and also allows the user to bookmark sites of interest.  The Inbox on the toolbar lets users keep up-to-date with their tags. Though this may put Diigo in contention with del.icio.us, these two sites can also be seen as complements to one another.  Regardless, it seems that social bookmarking is quickly becoming a battleground that leaves the door open to new competitors with fresh ideas, and that annotation may become a key to success in the arena.