I just looked at
the new research megatool Diigo and though
several bloggers have covered it in the past and in previous incarnations
(including our charming leader) I
think they really missed the boat when many called it an unexciting entry into
the crowded social bookmarking space. This is a web based knowledge worker’s
dream come true, it’s the kind of thing that makes me love web apps.

Diigo

As a part of different
projects I am working on, I am required to be online more than eight hours a
day. As much as I love being connected to the Web, the amount of information I
come across everyday is simply overwhelming. The tough part comes when I have to
organize and save this information for later use. As anyone can guess, the
bookmarks folder in my Firefox browser is very cluttered. Sometimes I need a
link or some content only temporarily but because of forgetfulness (or
laziness), those links remain bookmarked forever, which only leads to chaos.
Similarly, sometimes I need to bookmark just a paragraph from a page. However, I
still end up bookmarking the whole page. All of these things simply take my
brain into overdrive. That was until I discovered Diigo, that is.
Diigo has been a godsend for me. I can’t possibly imagine
organizing the vast amount of content I accumulate everyday if it wasn’t for
Diigo.

Diigo is essentially a site
following the lead of Del.icio.us. Primarily, it let’s you bookmark a page or a
part of it and save it online. However, there are certain other features too
that set it apart from the others. Let’s take a step by step walk through it,
shall we?

3. Part
Selection

This extremely handy
function comes into play when you want to select and bookmark only a part of a
particular Web page. For example, you want to save the third paragraph from a
five page article about the history of Scandinavia. To do so, make your
selection by using the mouse. If you have checked the “Show drop down menu when
some content is selected on a Web page” checkbox in the Diigo options, the Diigo
menu should automatically pop down. The way the three options (Bookmark, Forward
and Blog This) work is the same as discussed above. The only difference being
that they apply only to the selected part of the Web page. When you bookmark or
forward the selected portion, it will automatically be highlighted as well. When
you roll the mouse over the highlighted part, you will be given an option to
"Add sticky notes." You can use this to add notes to yourself or to
others.

Now,
every time you visit this page and roll your mouse over this selected text, your
sticky note should pop up with the extra information that you had entered.
Useful, isn’t it?! The Diigo drop down menu also gives you an option to copy the
selected text to the clipboard. If you make multiple text selections on a Web
page, Diigo will efficiently organize them according to their original position
in the source document. This is, of course, useful as everything is in sequence
when you are viewing it later.

Like most other bookmark
sites, Diigo lets you share your bookmarks with others. Similarly, you can go to
the community Web page on the Diigo site to see what everyone else is
bookmarking. You can add friends and share bookmarks among each other too. This
can be very useful when you are working with someone on a project. There are
plenty of innovative uses you can find with this free service. I use it to mail
myself not only the content I need to read later, but also jobs and "to do"
items from different Web pages. When I see an article that I think might
interest a friend or a colleague, it takes barely a click to forward it to them.
So, after reading through this long primer, are you ready to give it a spin? If
yes, then click on the link below to get started!

You can check out Diigo for
yourself here.

~ Yogesh Bakshi

Diigo: Social Bookmarking and Annotation





Thursday December 29th 2005, 3:55 am


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Update (03/29/06): Diigo has had many updates since this review.
Please stick around for a new review coming this week covering the many new
Diigo features.




I’ve been testing a new
social bookmarking service, Diigo, and found that it is actually
much more then just social bookmarking but an annotation tool as well. I come
across many websites, bookmark them, tag them, and then forget why I bookmarked
them in the first place. But with Diigo, you can save notes to
highlighted text on a page and even view a rough copy of the site in text-only
format (which they call a snapshot) at the point of bookmarking it. There are
also many more features and I will go over a few of them with you. The service
is currently in private beta, but if you would like to see a simple
demonstration, you may want to view their flash tutorial on how to use
Diigo.





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