Diigo Community

Diigo, which bills itself as a “social annotation” tool (previous coverage here), will present its platform at DEMOfall. Rather than just compiling interesting data found online, the platform allows you to organize by bookmarking, highlighting, and clipping only the most relevant elements of sites, including videos, and then adding sticky notes with annotations. These can then in turn be used to create a slideshows (Diigo’s WebSlides), that according to Diigo can be used by groups in collaborative efforts or presentations. In fact, it’s this community/collaborative element that Diigo hopes will help their service stand out from an already crowded space. In theory users will be driven to congregate around topics, feeding these with their own ideas and reflections through personal clippings and annotations, all the while discovering other collaborators on the same topics.

Diigo @ DEMOfall 07 - A True 3D Information App?

Diigo.com announced their re-launch today with an information network unlike any we have seen in  scope or capability. The new Diigo network being unveiled at DEMOfall 07 creates global communities around data, information, interests and knowledge. These new communities engage and connect people around the content they collect and use. Diigo is already one of the most useful bookmarking and research sites on the Web. The integration of Webslides and the power of "writing the Web" makes Diigo perhaps the Web's first truly 3 dimensional tool. I spoke with Diigo Co-Founder Maggie Tsai on Friday about their deep and groundbreaking vison. I covered Webslides a couple of weeks ago, but honestly did not envision the depth or scope of Diigo's potential. Maggie demonstrated the capability of a development nearly as complex and difficult to encapsulate as the semantic search engine's technology. The simple truth of Diigo combined with Webslides is that with continued refinements Diigo could well be the mega site imagined by many for Web 3.0. Diigo Plus Webslides Diigo users can create groups, lists, collaborative forums, do research, annotate or comment on pages and essentially build layers of data and knowledge atop any Web page. The concept of a multi-layered Web is difficult to grasp, but Maggie's team have begun to capture the power of what content-centric (their word my understanding) collaboration can do. "Writing" to the Web via sticky notes, annotations and highlighted elements combined with various collaborative elements is power for more than doing a research project. With the addition of Webslides - essentially an interactive, selective browser/player within a browser - Diigo provides a multifaceted platform for unbelievable collaboration and monetization potential. Diigo also unveiled another crucial element for "directing" data at users with their Webslides embeddable widget. This tool allows users to embed Webslides bookmark or RSS shows inside pages and blogs. These shows can be customized to express any number of topical or thematic blog posts, topical articles, product reviews, real estate offerings or just about anything one can imagine.

A Tall Order Diigo is certainly a fantastic individual or collaborative research tool, but inserting a platform like this into what we might call "the hub" (the center of what people do) of the Web has deeper implications. Bookmarking and social networking has seen massive appeal. The idea of wrapping users up in this core of data and knowledge has been touched upon by sites like Wikia, Digg, Stumble Upon, Facebook and many others in the various venues. All of these great sites gather content that is acted on and sometimes enhanced by users, but the data remains rather static or 2 dimensional for the user. Stumbled Upon comes closest to letting users "filter" the Web and its data but even there the great volume of information is lost or scattered with time. Diigo's methodology effectively turns Diigo into a Web within a Web of filtered, searchable and dynamic information.

An Easy Way To Present A Collection Of Sites

That is absolutely one of the most useful and amazing things I have seen in a long time! Wow! I am totally Stumbling this page! Garry

There are a few posts I’ve written here where I’ve mentioned the phenomenal bookmarking service call Diigo. It’s something I use all the time.

The folks at Diigo have pushed the envelope a little farther with something they’ve recently announced call WebSlides. The reasons for using such a service are numerous, but the one I see being used the most is for bloggers to highlight other sites. Another use is to create a presentation about your own blog for visitors to get to know about your place. It might be a nice addition to your sidebar or About page. A presentation is very simple to make. While in your Diigo account, you select the sites you want to include and save them to a list. You can then add an audio file for background music or narration if you like. Readers can adjust the speed at which they move from site to site. They can pause it or even click on the sites provided in a list at their own pace — all without having to create a Diigo account of their own. I’ve explained more in my own presentation, so click the button below and take it for a spin. (Btw, yes, that’s me narrating. )

I’m glad you took the time to drop a comment here. I really appreciate all that you guys do, and please know that you have a strong supporter of your service as I’ve talked about it a few times here and on my other blogs. Keep it up!

My favorite feature? When you highlight a word on any page a drop down menu automatically appears (see image below) that lets you: search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines search for highlighted terms in four social bookmarking systems do a blog search for highlighted terms search for your terms in the entire site you are on (Google, Yahoo, Ask site: search) search for inbound links to the URL you are on in four different search engines (including Technorati and Google) search for your highlighted terms in seven different verticals from local to TV to stocks.

I came across this site recently and I can definitely say it has made my browsing experience much more simplified and pleasurable.Diigo is a social annotation site that lets you post sticky notes on a webpage so next time you visit the site you remember something that you would otherwise forget. Just like that post-it-note that you stuck on your computer to remind you of something. Think, you visited Work N Play and added it to your favorites and you didn’t visit the site for a month ( that is rude ) and when you eventually did you forgot something that you wanted to say or write or read on the site. This is where diigo comes in handy.When you find a site and like it or have something you want to do later you can create a sticky post to remind you later, this sticky post stays on that site and you will be able to view it only when you browse the net by signing in to your diigo account. Also you can highlight texts on any site and add a note or remark as well.

Diigo also offers a toolbar which makes this process even simpler. You can sign in from the toolbar and start browsing the internet as you usually do. Whenever you come across a site that you stuck a note onto, it will be displayed. To make it even easier once you post a note or highlight a text on a site, you don’t have to try to remember it as everytime you post a note or highlight a sites text it will be saved under My Bookmarks in the toolbar. So next time just click on My Bookmarks and you can get the list of all the sites that you used a sticky post to. You can import your favorites from your favorites folder as well. I have been using this service for about a week and a half and I am loving it. It has given my aging mind some rest as I don’t have to try to remember some things because Diigo takes care of it for me.

the good news, use Diigo and not only can you bookmark the page, but you can even store the paragraph clipping for future reference.

Here are some products and services I saw at Demo that I plan to try out for my own use:

Diigo – I’m an active user of the del.icio.us social bookmarking service, but I’m frustrated by its limitations. A big one is that del.icio.us only provides a few characters with which to describe the pages I bookmark. I frequently run out of space trying to write a description. Diigo is social bookmarking for serious researchers. Users of its toolbar can highlight and annotate passages on bookmarked Web pages. People can comment on each other’s bookmarked pages and highlights. Essentially, the service creates group discussion around Web content. Anyone with the Diigo toolbar can see other users’ annotations and sites that choose to implement the Diigo protocols can provide these capabilities even to non-Diigo users. There are other innovatives features in this release, including a function that lets you create a PowerPoint-like slide show sequence using Web pages. I’m not sure I see much utility in that, but the highlighting feature alone could be enough to make me switch from del.icio.us.