Collecting bookmarks is only one way of collaborating with other people. Using  Diigo, which bills itself as a “social information network,” you can take notes that can be shared with other readers, adding a digital sticky note to a page. Building on this simple addition to social bookmarking, Diigo has built a research tool that individuals can use to tap the knowlege of stranges or that groups can use to organize their work and build extensive libraries about topics they care about. 

 

Diigo installs as a toolbar in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers. The toolbar brings the full features of the Diigo site along with one while browsing, to allow referring to one’s bookmark list, groups, friends’ and popular bookmarks collected the community. It includes annotation tools that allow highlighting of pages, adding sticky notes and to send links to friends and colleagues. Other social features include wishlists and the ability to conduct a discussion on the Diigo site and within the sticky notes attached to pages.

 

Beyond the social, Diigo’s toolbar is also handy as a way to collect and store bookmarks, giving members the ability to save reading for a later time and to keep track of what is still unread. It also lets users create filters that help find and change or remove tags, bookmarked pages and more recently added pages. Members’ bookmarks can be kept completely private–the toolbar’s options allow default settings from private to public or sharing only to friends and groups to which the user belongs.

The company provides users of other browsers a “Diigolet,” a bookmark that saves the URL for the page currently displayed in the browser to the user’s Diigo dashboard. It doesn’t provide the collaboration and organization features of the toolbar.

Diigo is impressive as a tool for meeting informed people. Searches return not only bookmarked pages that are tagged with the search word, it presents the top contributors on the subject to whom one can subscribe and as list of groups that track the topic. Their knowledge is also available on the pages they bookmark, if they add sticky notes. When browsing, look for the Diigo sticky note marker, a numeral (indicating how many contributors have added comments) in a cartoon talk bubble that can be clicked to open the annotation.

Diigo also gives members different ways to organize themselves. For example, members can become part of groups that pay attention to particular web sites or tags. These groups are issue and expertise based. It’s another convenient way to start getting involved.

Home Page: Diigo.com
A social bookmarking and community web annotation tool.

Free.

Tags: collaboration, discussion, friend lists, groups, social bookmarking, tagging, web annotation, wishlist

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.