"The Heart of Highland" is an album recorded by seven ethic artists from China and Mongolia. The featuring artist Sitar Tan (Chinese name as Tan Wei Wei) has a very unique and powerful voice and it can be found in the song "Walk Into Tibet". The album has incorporated the country folk style of Tibetan and pop song in a creative music arrangement. That led Sitar to stream through the colors of innocent ethic and modern sound. Sitar is a truly talent with a mounting and warm voice. In the album, besides the strong Tibetan style song "Divine Eagle", Sitar did a great performance on the Xin Jiang (a North West province of china) dance song "A Girl from March Land". All those have reflected the pop ethic music style of Sitar.

More remarkable artists in the album like Na Ren and Wu Ren have contributed their gifted voices in interpreting an intense Mongolian ethic affection. Besides, they have collaborated with the 4 mans R&B and Jazz group Camerton from Ulan Bator (the main city of Mongolia). Through the dimension of time in a their music expression, and with the performance of Sitar, the whole album was filled up with an unusual enchanting atmosphere. That has given an impulse in the modern pop ethic sound.

The song "Mirage" adopted certain part of the original reference material of the pop hit "The Eyes of Truth" (by Enigma). That reference material is a piece of a pop Mongolian Shepard song. "Mirage" has refreshed this part of material in the rich color of pop ethic sound and in a fusion of heart-touching symphony.

Diigo, finally, has some of these new ideas. They allow you to highlight text on a page, and share those highlights. You can then view those highlights the next time you see the page, and they are included in your bookmark list. You can also “extract” the highlights: check some items in your list, select “Extract highlights”, and a web page is displayed with a list of the selected items and their highlights. You can also add sticky notes to the highlights, and share them. That way, everyone can see your notes, and even respond to them.

There’s also the Diigo toolbar, which has some good extended features. Annotations are for example always displayed, and not only after you clicked the bookmarklet. You can also search via the toolbar, bookmark quick (without entering tags), bookmark to other services simultaneously, and blog about a page. When bookmarking, the toolbar also allows you to immediately add a new comment about the page, something the bookmarklet doesn’t allow. What both the toolbar and the bookmarklet allow, is forwarding the page via mail to a friend, with a customized message and the highlights on the page. I don’t really like toolbars, so I won’t keep this one installed (or I’ll at least hide it), but I think the toolbar can be very helpful for some people.

A few weeks back I managed to score an invite to a new social bookmarking/annontation site called diigo. I am quite excited by the potential of a service such as this and its really starting to realise some of the oppourtunity out there. Essentially diigo lets you bookmark pages, tag those bookmarks, add comments to those bookmarks, highlight content within pages, add comments to those pages that are viewable by all diigo users and utilise all the community features your used to like subscribing to your friends lists.

Thats not a list of features that springs out of the page, many of these ideas have been attempted previously. Its more the deftness that diigo handles these ideas with that makes it stand out from the pack. Theres also the fact that its all bundled into one service.

Take, for example the BBC News site. Theres an awfull lot of content on there, some of which I would be interested in the thoughts of others on. Currently only certain, carefully chosen stories feature comments. diigo, however, allows you to comment on these stories, furthermore you can highlight actual pieces of text within the story and comment on them. And then others can view your comments and add their own. It is possible to have a linear conversation based around single web pages or even paragraphs of content.

When you take the potential of the above and add in a competant social bookmarking service you can begin to see where diigo is heading as a service. The diigo team are aware that there are numerous other services out there, the one that is certainly a huge obstacle in terms of social bookmarking is del.icio.us, a service that I absolutely love. To make the transition a bit easier you can import your bookmarks into diigo from del.icio.us, you can also automatically add your diigo bookmarks to del.icio.us

Our design philosophy is simple -- what makes the most sense to us as users, what we'd like to have as users ourselves, and what are some creative ways to do things even better... We'd like to continue thinking out-of-the-box, and not to be totally bound by traditional framework or method of doing things.

• Easier to Bookmark: Recent updates allows users to add a 'Diigolet' to their bookmarks; a button that allows you to add whatever page you are viewing to your Diigo bookmarks, an invaluable tool for information hungry users.
• Importing/Exporting: Badges are the 'hip' thing right now and Diigo doesn't want to miss out on it. So, they will be releasing a linkroll that will allow users to add their recent bookmarks to their blogs or websites to share what they have been bookmarking. You can also import your Del.icio.us bookmarks to your Diigo account.
• Toolbars: The Diigo toolbar has also been upgraded. You can blog about the page you are viewing with the "Blog-This" button, as well as instantaneously add the page you are viewing to your bookmarks.

Diigo: Social Bookmarking and More...

Diigo is a new social annotation/bookmarking tool. In one respect it is similar to del.icio.us. It even takes advantage of the del.icio.us API so that items that you tag or bookmark with Diigo, are also tagged to your del.icio.us account. Where it is quite different from del.icio.us, is that you can also more fully annotate your bookmarked pages, and bookmarks can also be saved locally. You can highlight and tag specific images and paragraphs from web pages, and also add sticky notes. These sticky notes can be public or private. For example if I tag and add a sticky note to a page, I can also see other sticky notes left by others or I can send a notification to a colleague so that she can read my annotation and respond. I can also use Diigo to save my selections and annotations and review them later. I can also forward them on via email. The Diigo toolbar puts all of these tools at your disposal.

The Flash Tutorial gives a very good overview. The more I play with Diigo the more it looks like an interesting alternative/compliment to del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.u

Social Annotation