Diigo is a Bookmarking, Annotation and Social Networking site that has got me all excited. I think I am in love.

I first tried Diigo when it came out in 2006 but it did not turn my eye; it was a touch too young and inexperienced then. Diigo 3 was launched 20th March 2008, showing a new maturity. After seeing its attractive new features I have been unfaithful to Delicious, my bookmarking partner of 5 years, and fallen in love with the younger and more versatile diigo.

I have always stayed with Delicious, despite its lack of sparkling design and social networking features, because it allowed me to organize my bookmarks well. I used it as a resource for research and referral purposes.

What I like about diigo

• Bookmarking
  - As well as bookmarking and tagging:
  • Create lists to add specific bookmarks to and produce interactive web slides from these.
  • Importing of bookmarks from your browser and other bookmarking sites is easy to do.
  • You are able to automatically add bookmarks to Delicious and other bookmarking sites too. I am two timing for now. If you do not want to automatically duplicate bookmarks you can do it manually via the “publish” button next to the diigo bookmark.
  • An RSS feed is available for your bookmarks and your lists.
  • A widget can be created to display items on your blog - as you can see in my sidebar.
  • Tag communities show you bookmarks by tag and the members who have used that tag.

  

• . Diigo allows you to annotate web pages.
  • You can highlight areas you find of interest and add sticky notes, (or highlight just to add the text as a description of your bookmark). The highlights remain when you return to a page, which makes it easy to find the areas that you were interested in.
  • If a page has changed since your last visit you can view a cached version with your annotations in place.
• Social Networking is possible via adding friends and joining groups. Knowledge sharing is one of the main aims of the site.
  • You can find friends by searching your email addresses for existing diigo users or inviting those who are not yet members.
  • You can browse for those who share similar interests, search for those you know and see who is currently online.
  • Invite members to groups you belong to.

Groups allow you to find those who share your interests. (When bookmarking you can choose to share it with a group, with your friends and add to a list.) Voting for a group bookmark via a thumbs up raises its profile - the idea is that the more popular better content becomes easier to find.

• Search by tags is possible and you can set up watch lists for specific tags.
• Diigo lets you see everyone who has bookmarked your site and what they saved - a handy tool to research what is popular on your blog.

Diigo operates via a browser extension which installs a toolbar with options for interacting with diigo and a sidebar showing your bookmarks. I am impressed by their features.

The Toolbar

The toolbar allows you to:

• Highlight parts of a page for future visits.
• Add sticky notes to the highlighted areas.
• If you have selected text before bookmarking, this is added to the bookmark’s description.
• Bookmark it to diigo (and to your browser favorites and other social networking sites).
• Add comments relating to the page you are on.
• Send the page to your diigo friends, to your blog, twitter or Facebook.
• Send messages and receive message alerts.

Sidebar

The sidebar is split into 3 tabs:

The URL tab:

• Shows you other members who have bookmarked the page you are on.
• Displays annotations that have been added to the page by yourself and or others.
• Allows you to leave a comment via the sidebar which will be visible to all diigo users who visit the page.

The Bookmarks Tab

• Shows your bookmarks, tags or lists:

The Friends Tab

• Lists your friends and allows you to message them via email or diigo messaging system. My mate Colin has found me but I have not yet found anyone else I know on there. My profile name is Sue Blimely hint hint.

Diigo’s interface is well designed and I found it easy to find my way around its features right from the start.

I suspect Delicious and I may separate but still remain friends. After all I am still throwing bookmarks its way and will visit from time to time to add any new tags to the right categories.

I really hope diigo becomes extremely popular as I would happily use the site as my main social networking venue if more of my friends and contacts were to join.

As usual I am a little late with the news of the new diigo because I had to give it a good work out before I reported on it. I have spent hours playing with it, uploading my bookmarks from Delicious, creating lists, annotating, adding sticky notes, joining groups ….

I created a list specifically for my own blog posts and one for diigo. This link takes you to all the posts and diigo tutorials I have bookmarked for you to browse through and learn more. A snippet of these is displayed in the tag roll widget to the right.

Thanks to Phil Butler whose article alerted me to the diigo changes and motivated me to go and take another look. He says “Diigo has refined a social annotation and collaboration service into an even more effective “personal and group oriented tool” - which is how I would have defined it if I could have thought up something so concise and meaningful!

I am off to be sociable now - join some diigo groups and find me some friends. I hope to see you there.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

In Love with diigo Farewell del.icio.us

I have been trialling the Wordpress ‘Yahoo Shortcuts‘ plugin for a week or so now. As I found it a little tricky to come to grips with, I thought I would give you a bit of a run down on how to use it and a review based on my experiences. The images and popup links in this post have mostly been embedded using the plugin.

This plugin uses Yahoo Shortcuts to add Yahoo search popups and Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos to blog content.

The image to the left is an example of a Yahoo Shortcuts “badge”.

As you are writing your post, the plugin searches for media relevant to your content. A message, at the top of the sidebar in your post window, alerts you to the number of ‘Shortcuts’ that have been found, allows you to review the post and choose whether to include all or some of suggested links and images:

The information suggested is based on various Yahoo search topics and services. A ‘Shortcut’ may lead to a Flickr image, a financial data, stock quotes , a map , a news item or information about specific companies, products, and people. More services are to be added (maybe maybe sports, movies, and music?)

If you want to view and add what has been suggested for inclusion in your post, click on the “Review this Post” button. You will be taken to an edit screen, which shows your post with the suggested shortcut ‘keywords’ underlined with a blue dotted line and a small arrow icon to the right of them. Hovering over the underlined word gives you a preview of the link suggested. Clicking on the arrow brings up options based on the type of content suggested. From here you can delete the link. Where graphical representations are available you can choose to convert the link into a badge, which embeds an image instead.

A section at the bottom of the Yahoo post review window post shows Flickr thumbnails based on keywords in your post. If there are no images to your liking, a search function allows you to browse for more within the same window.

Hovering over a thumbnail will produce a popup window showing you a larger version of the image. If you decide to include it, clicking the “Add to Post button in this window produces another popup window where you can choose the size of image. Pressing “Submit” here will insert the image into your the review post window. Once you are happy with the shortcuts included, press save and you will be taken back to your post window.

Opinion:

Flickr Image placement - if you wish to move the image from its automatically embedded position at the top of the post to somewhere else, care has to be taken that your post layout is not messed up and that text is not floating in places you don’t want it to go. Center placement may be the safest. This image came up for the words “Flickr Image” and he is cute so I thought I would leave him here:

I have not found much use for the linking and badge features, but it was only its Flickr image capabilities that initially attracted me to the plugin.My blog topics do not lead to many automatically suggested and relevant Flickr images. I can, however see this feature being of great use to some blogs.

Once I got used to the interface the plugin became much quicker to use.

Let me try some words to see what the plugin comes up with:

“Funny Sign”‘

“Chocolate”

That is too tempting, I feel a chocolate attack coming on.

Links:

• Yahoo! Shortcuts page
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Download page.
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Demo Video

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Yahoo Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress