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Special preview: DEMOfall '07 highlights A new crop of startups take the stage to pitch their wares, and as usual, the accent is on Web 2.0 and collaboration

Access to and the sharing of information is this year's theme with companies demonstrating tools for team collaboration, tracking online information, information filtering, and a technology that is harder to explain than use: Turning the Web in a participatory medium for bookmarking, clipping, and discussion sharing. Diigo is both the name of the product and the company that turns a Web site into a "participatory" site, according to Wade Ren, CEO and co-founder. "Diigo doesn't need enterprise adoption to work, but the more people who do adopt it, the better it is," says Ren. Diigo allows users to highlight portions of a Web site and add comments, using the design concept of a sticky note or a cartoon bubble. The note is persistent, so next time the user opens the site, the note will be there. The tool is a browser plug-in that can be downloaded and placed in the IE or Firefox tool bar. While wikis like Wikipedia make sets of pages writable and editable, Diigo makes the entire Web a writable media, according to Ren.

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week. The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner. WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”. There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

The twice-yearly DEMO conferences, now in their 17th year, are known for seeking out and showcasing important new technologies that usher in new methods of computing. [DEMO is produced by Network World Conferences, a unit of tech publishing giant IDG.]

DEMOfall '07 is taking place September 24-26 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. It will introduce 69 carefully vetted products and services (see below) to "an audience of investors, business development executives, media, pundits, and fellow entrepreneurs."  I would expect attendance in the neighborhood of 700, based on past experience. Presenters include both early-stage and established companies.

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.

Chris Shipley kicked off DEMOfall 07 in a major way, claiming that everything is in a state of 2.0. And, by 2.0 she simply inferred to the fact that technology is innovating and revolutionizing across every sector. And after sitting through a day of DEMO presenters, so far it’s very clear that she’s absolutely right.

Diigo WebSlides Previews at Office 2.0 September 6, 2007 — 09:39 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This Diigo, the online research tool for business solutions, is previewing a new browser-based player at the Office 2.0 Conference today. This patent-pending player from Diigo, called WebSlides, lets you create a slide show with web pages. From a collection of bookmarks, you can indicate which web pages you’d like to include for your slide show, or just insert which websites you’d like to add. Use drag’n'drop technology to arrange and rearrange the order of your slides. You can leave “sticky notes” and highlights to indicate notes and further discussion around a particular area of a web page. This is useful for teams, as other team members can add to the sticky notes as well. There’s also the option of adding a voice over so your slide show can be narrated. Slide shows can be public or private, and shared with a select few. For viewers, the link to each web page displays at the bottom of the slide show, along with other viewing options for screen size, the list of slides in the show for easy navigation, and more. What this tool bar lacks is the option for viewers to grab the embed code, though creators have the option of sharing and embedding these slide shows.

I've personally had the opportunity to demo Diigo's new Webslide feature. I can personally attest that it's very easy-to-use and takes collaboration on the internet to a whole new level. Webslides allows users to showcase important data and information in a "real-time" session that does away with the traditional need to develop screen-shots pasted into a PPT presentation. Users can essentially turn any portion of internet into a PowerPoint show with a few easy clicks! Nice work Diigo!

Ever wondered how to create a guided tour for a website, or an easy slideshow of a selection of webpages? Unless you try and capture a series of screenshots, and them arrange them in something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, it's not exactly easy. Thankfully, you will soon be able to do such a thing online (with live-updating website views) as Diigo has previewed a new product called Webslides at the Office 2.0 conference.If you're wanting to know more about this rather nifty forthcoming tool, then read on as there's video and more after the break. How do you go about creating a presentation? According to Diigo, "users simply collect and organize any set of links into a list, and add background music or voice narration. By clicking "Play," the list transforms into a slideshow bringing Web pages and user comments to life." The fact that you can annotate, and even voice-over, these presentations is pretty impressive, and we can easily see how this tool could find a home in education, client proofing (for web designs) and more. If you're wondering how on earth this could be useful, we'd highly recommend checking out the example movies found on the Diigo website (such as this "Funny sites on the Web" slideshow)

I’ve been using Diigo for quite some time now to annotate, bookmark and share webpages. Now, they are offering a new functionality with the potential to become an even more effective tool to share knowledge in a great format as the video explains. Imagine collecting all your different web pages to research a vacation or group trip, annotate them, add voice commentary and then share them with friends or participants. Also, a travel agent could put together a collection of information and send it on in an attractive form to a client.

Monitoring my feeds, I’ve noticed there has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding a service called WebSlides. WebSlides is brought to you by the same folks that are behind Diigo, one of many social bookmarking services that are on the net. WebSlides allows users to take their bookmarks and turn them into a slide show.

The ideas and the possibilities, do seem endless. The service is currently in an invite-only stage of life however, I have signed up and if they provide me with an invitation, I’ll be sure to provide you with an in depth review.

webslides from diigo - slideshows of bookmarked pages September 7th, 2007 · No Comments Webslides is a useful add-on feature from what I already consider to be the premier social bookmarking device on the web - diigo. This feaure allows you to create a slide show from your bookmarks so they become more interesting and you can highlight what you want. This lets you convey a series of points quickly and gives rise to an overall effect. Kind of like the difference between a picture and a group of pictures that run together to make a short movie. Each frame is meaningful, but in the aggregate they gain much, much more meaning and impact. Okay, enough about that. Just try it and see if you agree.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with diigo, it’s a collaborative bookmarking tool available for free on the web. It fits in and becomes part of your browser so you can capture information of any kind (words, audio, video, URLs, etc.) while browsing, doing research, etc. So far I’ve just described bookmarking, which we’ve all been doing that since Internet Explorer and Netscape were duking it out in 1995. So what’s the difference? The twist is diigo (like many competing services such as del.icio.us, furl, spurl, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and others) makes your bookmarks available to all other users of the service, while doing the same for you. Instant sharing. Of course you can also restrict your bookmarks to a particular group or keep them to yourself. But where’s the fun in that?

I maintain a few groups on diigo myself on topics such as legal technology, real property law, the current mortgage meltdown, divorce, immigration … you get the idea. You can check out my diigo groups and join them yourself (yes, I’m encouraging you to do so) by going to http://groups.diigo.com/. As always, thank you for your support.

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......

Webslides from Diigo I got an email from Diigo to check out their newest coolest web 2.0 innovation. They call it webslides and it is basically an animation that presents your favorite bookmarks. Just select a bunch of bookmarks, add some voice or sound if you want to, and that's it. Now people can see the things you like.When I was visiting the webslides site, I got a 'knowledge accident' and stumbled upon one on e-learning bookmarks "Transforming education through technology"

Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

I received an email recently about a new service from Diigo called WebSlides which lets you, as they say, "convert your bookmarks into slideshows." However, I think their marketing plan to sell WebSlides as just another bookmarking tool is doing it a disservice. I initially could not imagine why I would want my bookmarks saved as slideshows, but I immediately saw the value of the app as a training tool. I could picture WebSlide users making a walkthrough of how to use a particular website, presenting the features of a new web service, or making a WebSlide show to be used in a classroom setting. WebSlides' value is not just in the way it lets you stitch together a series of web pages together to form a slideshow; it is the ability to add sticky notes, highlights, and integrated annotations to the slideshows that make the service so useful. In addtion, you can record and narrate tracks to go along with the slideshow or add music. Some other suggestions for the use of WebSlides, as noted on their site, include: Show a list of houses to real estate clients Review a list of job candidates found online Bundle important course resources for students Assemble all the pages on a specific family line Provide guided use cases for potential customers Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers Provide a quick briefing, a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject.

Since most of my presentations are largely guided tours of pertinent Web services, this baby will save me a ton of time. Combine site syndication and social bookmarking with presentations and you get WebSlides, a service from social bookmarking service Diigo that turns RSS feeds and bookmark lists into annotated browser slideshows.

Diigo To Launch Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 Research toolbox, diigo is going to introduce Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. The new Webslides widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format – complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. It can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also adds a new layer to the web by allowing any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. For more on the subject, see TechCrunch.

WebSlides - Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… — A new Diigo service– with del.icio.us posting and some interesting annotation possibilities I keep thinking I should switch to Diigo as main posting point for sharing links

With the use of a tool such as webslides, students could then view the web site with the article or link to the primary source of the research. The students could view the websites with annotations by the teachers to support the students’ current level of understanding of the material or add additional information or questions to enhance the instruction. Students could then work in their groups to discuss their findings to their peers. This would allow students to come to their own conclusions from the information that they are presented. The assessment could be the presentation of their findings and conclusions via a posting to the class website or some other tool that would allow them to present what new ideas they synthesized and not a high tech presentation with little to no substance. Students would work in the same manner that other scientists around the world are by looking at the new data from research. The article was posted on the 20th of this month, two days ago, and students could be researching about the discovery tomorrow the 23rd. This changing of ideas also illustrates to students the way in which scientific knowledge changes and gets refined in light of new information from researchers. So could this lesson be taught without computer technology? Absolutely but technology allows the instruction to be much more fluid and connected. The teacher could run off all the articles, write on them and make copies for the class, but the exchange of information would likely not be as fluid.

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.