April 30, 2008
Horsepower #44 Diigo.com: social bookmarking meets Facebook meets Cliff’s Notes…
“Making social bookmarking truly social”Faced with the daunting task of researching and annotating huge documents on the web, A few years ago Dr. Wade Ren and Maggie Tsai out-surfed the capabilities of browser bookmark features and online bookmarking services. If you have a long web document with only a few widely spaced relevant paragraphs what do you do?
You print it out, or copy to a document and print then get out the old highlighter pen. Then you fax it, or scan it and send it along, and soon you have a problem. A problem that, for Ren and Tsai, turned into the opportunity to create a new social bookmarking service.
As we discussed in a previous post, and as Dr. Ren reiterated, Diigo is like del.icio.us on steroids. It takes bookmarking functionality and extends it with forum, blog and messaging features. If you take the time to annotate a page, leave sticky notes, multiple and lengthy comments, and highlight key text on the page, you can then view and forward all the relevant information w/o having to go to the page, or see other public comments and highlights and interact with other Diigo users.
With support for and compatibility with del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Simpy; plugins or bookmarklets for every major browser; openid support; compatibility with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal; a Facebook App; groups, lists, email and widgets; Diigo is embracing the open everything web 2.0 spirit and making a super useful community oriented tool.
But it’s not just for fun! We use it for internal research with private bookmarks and private groups. We have a few clients participating in Diigo groups almost like a Basecamp style project management site. Combined with other free site/services like Flickr, Wordpress or other blogs, and file sharing sites like drop.io and Zoho.com this could give 37signals a run for their money.Thanks to Wade and Maggie for the visit. It’s great meeting leaders in web development who live right here in Reno!
After Earl turned off the camera we gave them each a Red Bull and asked them what’s next. Here’s what they said: A LOT OF COOL STUFF… You didn’t think I was gonna tell you?!!?! Look for just about everything you want from Diigo to come to life in future versions.
-Mike
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Posted in Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Social, Web & SEO
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 am
Thanks for this! This is really great information for people like me who have been playing with diigo (or another social bookmarking tool) for a while but weren’t sure about some of the background/future stuff. I’ll be very glad to share it with friends and classmates as I try to show how useful this tool can be!
I don’t know what range of readers is for your blog, but I created an “introduction to social bookmarking” video/tutorial for a class project that looks at diigo from a “lower” starting point. Talking to my classmates, many of them had never heard of social bookmarking, so I decided to start with adding things to your favorites instead of something like del.icio.us. If that would be useful to anyone, it’s on youtube and facebook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcecBgRd3ig
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=509154105808
The facebook version is clearer but of course requires a login. Of course there are also several great videos by the diigo folks on youtube too..
http://www.youtube.com/user/diigobuzz
Theirs are faster paced and show of some more advanced features, so it depends on the audience which would be more helpful.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 am
[...] find out the inside scoop, be sure to check out our interview and [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] will not be the first to say it, but Diigo is like del.icio.us on steriods. Diigo bookmarks your favorite sites, uses tags to [...]
November 26th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Thanks for the info i never know youcan go that far with diigo, Iussually use diigo as a simple as a bookmarks tool, I kind a can dive in more right now….
Thanks.
:).
December 5th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
[...] wiki). Diigo is a local company here in Reno, and I’ve had initial email discussions with Mary Tsai to help us out if [...]