web 2.0 blog » Beta Review - diigo social bookmarking and ann...

the best way to sum up a service like diigo is that it overlays a Web 2.0 service on top of Web 1 sites. Things like tagging, annotation, social bookmarking and social commenting are very Web 2.0 in nature. diigo allows you to apply these ideas to normal Web 1 style sites.

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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

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One of the things I’ve seen other people rave about is the ability to have “private” objects on diigo. So an annotation, bookmark, comment etc can be hidden from other users, something that can only currently be done in del.icio.us with a hack. Personally I think this is neither here nor there, while its nice to have the option (when I first started using del.icio.us I did feel I was being forced into the whole social aspect of it rather than finding my own way) it does remove from some of the community aspects. Of course this is an obvious attempt to move diigo into local (browser) bookmark territory as opposed to what del.icio.us is usually used for, which tends to be more for points of interest. There are sites I have bookmarked, such as my bank, that I would never add to del.icio.us, I would be more tempted to add it as a private bookmark to diigo (although I haven’t).

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The bookmarklet is in fact very advanced, you fire it up and a small toolbar appears at the top of your browser window. One option allows you to bookmark the page and there are links to your diigo bookmarks and subscriptions. Theres also a “highlight” option that only becomes active when you have some text highlighted. Generally the bookmarklet works well, you can hide it from your screen and call it back by moving your mouse to the left of the browser and it generally copes well.

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To sum up, I liked the diigo service. Its attempt to augment basic webpages with advanced features is admirable. Currently theres a sense of community lacking which may be down to the fact that it is currently a closed beta, it may also be down to the lack of a “popular” page be it overall or by tag, both would be good. There are also a lot of features that are in the pipeline and alot of features that I didn’t get a chance to test out, features like “Blog This”

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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.

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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.

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