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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.

Diigo WebSlides Previews at Office 2.0

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 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.

webslides from diigo - slideshows of bookmarked pages

September 7th, 2007<!-- by mhedayat --> · No Comments

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.

Webslides from Diigo

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.

Why Didn't I Think of That?

Why Didn't I Think of That?

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.

Diigo To Launch WebSlides At TechCrunch40

Diigo To Launch Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40

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 20^th of this month, two days ago, and students could be researching about the discovery tomorrow the 23^rd. 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.

I’ve mentioned the bookmarking service known as Diigo here before. I use it all the time to save my bookmarks as well as make backup copies to two additional bookmarking sites at the same time.

The folks at Diigo have gone one step further by introducing something called WebSlides. There are a variety of reasons why you can use this free service, but the one I’m going to use it for the most is to highlight sites that I find for my blog readers.



The presentations are simple to make. You select any site you’ve saved in your Diigo account and copy it to a WebSlides list. If you want, you can upload an audio file to accompany your set of slides as your viewers are watching. You can even leave comments or sticky notes on the sites for your viewers to read and they can do the same.

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.

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. )