Diigo - A really useful program

A program I’m finding incredibly useful at the moment is Diigo. It’s an online bookmarking service, which allows you to annotate and highlight webpages. It’s at last solved the problem of what I do with interesting websites and articles, other than just let them pile up in the “Favourites” section of Internet Explorer.

Now I can easily find any webpage that I have bookmarked, and not only find it but also see the bits I found especially interesting with any comments that I made.

That’s only scratching the surfuce of what Diigo can do. This video will give you a much better idea than I can describe in a short posting:

Comments

[robboulter]

Great to see you blogging again. These new sites are all part of the web2.0 rollercoaster. Another one I suggest you check out is

http://del.icio.us/

It's got a facility to share bookmarks and generate tag clouds. All good stuff. Rgds Rob.

[Mark Forster]

Thanks, Rob.

Basically Diigo does much the same as Del.icio.us with the addition that you can add highlights and annotations to websites. These can be seen by the people you share the link with.

Also the highlighted areas show up on your own list of bookmarks. This means I don't have to go back to the bookmarked website in order to see the bit I found interesting in it. It's this more than anything that I find invaluable about Diigo.

At a guess, Del.icio.us is probably better at the social sharing side, and Diigo at the private and personal side. This may change as Diigo gets better known.

[Werner]

Dear Mark,
for the task you are referring to I prefer a program called EVERNOTE. You can take a look here: www.evernote.com
It lets you do all the things that DIIGO can but you can group, regroup and search all your information easily. It is a powerful way to organize the information you find on the Internet.

Werner

[Mark Forster]

Dear Werner

Thanks for your comment. I know Evernote well and indeed if you do a search for it on this site you will find that it is mentioned quite a few times.

For some purposes Evernote is hard to beat, but for the specific task of bookmarking websites my feeling is that Diigo is far superior.

Evernote won't let you put annotations and highlights on the webpage you are bookmarking, nor can you easily share them with other users. Diigo also makes it easy to make several extracts from one page and keep them together in one entry, properly annotated so you can easily find them in the original. You can also add sticky notes and your own comments without getting them confused with the original text.

On the minus side, Diigo can only be used for referencing websites. You can't use it for referencing stuff on your own computer - there Evernote wins hands down.

From the point of view of grouping, regrouping and searching the information, the two programs are about equal - though I find Diigo's interface easier to use and it has a more sophisticated advanced search facility.

[Matthew Cornell]

Mark - your note re: Evernote (a great program) is spot on. I want a program I can love, but my expectations are apparently too high. I use a plain text file as a single collection point - in it I can annotate anything that's online.

Here are some of the features that I need (and have):

o simple, portable format
o item-based model
o chronological ordering, with time-stamps for each entry
o time-stamped items
o rapid capture
o web capture (URL, title, optional selection)
o wiki-style inter-item tags/links (aka categories)
o allows multiple tags per entry, or *part* of an entry
o ability to mark up/comment on arbitrary sections of a resource
o completion/auto-complete of tags, words, etc. (tagging is very fast)
o powerful search (regex, single key, across all entries)


However, there are important limitations, including:

o fragile linking to a section
o fragile format
o no support for emergent/organic structuring
o no network-based search or reporting
o no data recognizers
o no caching of source material (can extract, of course)
o no linking to documents ("")


I'd love to find a tool that does this. I call it an IDE for PIM - see:

Where's the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for personal information?
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2006/03/wheres-ide-integrated-development.html

I've looked at a lot of them over the years, including EverNote. Sadly, this mix isn't found, AFAIK.

P.S. This is fun: http://www.stikkit.com/

[Mike Brown]

Here's a techcrunch article from April '07 (hence, 50 years ago in Internet time) on five web apps, including Diigo:

Five Ways to Mark Up the Web
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/10/5-ways-to-mark-up-the-web/

[Padraig O'Morain]

Hi Mark. Agree with you on Diigo. I've started using Google Notes, though, and find it does a similar job a little more zippily. Padraig

[Dave]

I'm with Padraig on the Google Notes.

D

[Mark Forster]

Thanks for the tip about Google Notes, Padraig and Dave. As you'll see from my posting today I have decided to do a comparison test between them.