Library clips

Diigo is a social bookmark service with a difference as it also annotates webpages (sticky notes)…it has a bunch of powerful features.

The interface is super clean and friendly and the tour is magic…learn more…help.

It’s been around for a while but it is still invitation only…they are going to launch soon.

Bookmarking

Similar to many of the other services…tags, users, etc…

When you look at bookmarks on the home page you can expand a bookmark to see comments, you can see all the comments users have left on that bookmark (you don’t even have to bookmark the page yourself in order to comment).

The only thing is, where can I see all bookmarks I’ve commented on (whether I’ve bookmarked it myself or not)…when you comment on a bookmark you can choose public/private, if I comment on a bookmark not in my collection and mark it private, where do I see this, I can’t seem to see it on the home page.
There must be a section to see bookmarks I’ve commented on, I just can’t see it.

There is a URL history feature…who else has bookmarked the same page.

You can also copy a link to your collection, but the tags copy as well, I wish I could tag it before I submit.

Save pages via a toolbar or a bookmarklet or mouse…at the time of bookmarking it will suggests tags or view your tag set, it also shows all comments, and you can mark it unread. You can also select a box to save it in other bookmark services at the same time, and save it in you browser favourites as well. Even more, you can send it to a friend while you are bookmarking the page…so much can happen when you save a page to your collection.

Every page is cached (click on snaphot)…this means full-text search.

Each tag has a feed, and you can also quick subscribe to each tag so you can read the latest from your inbox section (My Subscriptions).

Here is the community page.

Annotation

Not only can you bookmark pages but you can highlight and leave sticky notes in multiple sections of the page…this helps you remember why you bookmarked a page in the first place…also great for research purposes.

These highlights and notes are left on the page, next time you visit the page the highlights will be there, just hover your mouse over to read the sticky notes.

Furl has a clippings field, but it just appears in your bookmarks…it won’t appear when you re-visit the page…Clipmarks also clips sections of the page/s, but again it only appears in your bookmarks.

So this is the power of Diigo, you get to annotate pages and see these when you re-visit the webpage…also in your bookmarks you can expand a link and it will display notes/highlights you have left on the page (this is the same expand button that show comments), so you don’t have to go to the native page to see the annotations….you can even add more notes to the same highlight from here.

Earlier this month I posted, Granular Tagging or Index Tagging, this is basically tagging sections of a webpage, Diigo can highlight/note sections but not tag these highlights/notes…this may be a handy integration for personal research purposes.

Mouse

Right-click
- bookmark
- forward (email)

Highlight and Right-click
- bookmark and highlight
- highlight and forward
- blog this

Highlight (Left-click)
- bookmark and highlight
- highlight and forward
- blog this
- Search the web, bookmarks, blogs, etc…
- Copy with or without format

Back to it

Why not share your notes, email (forward) some of your bookmarks with highlights/notes to a friend, or if your notes are made public, others from the Diigo community will be able to see your notes when they visit a webpage (best of both worlds)
…so if several Diigo users highlight and leave sticky notes on a given page and make their annotations public, there will be a lot of useful information…I wonder if it will look cluttered or if you can turn off the annotated view for that session, or choose just to see your annotations…a little manual override [ADDED: found it in the view mode in the toolbar].

What I like about the user space is that each bookmark has a box, you can tick boxes (or tick the all box) then select from the action menu, such as forward (email), edit, delete, mark unread, etc…actually another choice is extract highlight, this takes you to a permalink where you can see just your highlights for that bookmark.

So you can see your highlights at the native page, via the expand link in your bookmarks, and at a permalink via the extract selection from the action menu.

There are 3 views for your collection: bookmarked recently, commented recently, unread.

If I decide to leave a comment on an old bookmark of mine, it will go to the top of the commented recently view, this must also happen if someone else comments on this same bookmark…still no section to see just bookmarks I have commented on (whether it’s in my collection or not).

Search

The toolbar can search your bookmarks, all bookmarks, users, even full-text…it will even search other engines: web, bookmarks, blogs, etc…clever idea as the toolbar can be used for stuff other than Diigo.

Watch out Simpy because these search features are just as comprehensive, check it out:

- with the words in Tags
- with the words in Title
- with the words in Text
- with the words in Comments
- with the words in Highlights
- with the words anywhere
- without the words anywhere

tag: word1 - find bookmarks with word1 in tags
word1 word2 - find bookmarks with both word1 and word2
word1 or word2 - find bookmarks with either word1 or word2
“word1 word2″ - find bookmarks with the phrase “word1 word2″
word1 -word2 - find bookmarks with word1, but not word2
word1* - find bookmarks with words containing word1 as a prefix
tag:word1* - find bookmarks with tags containing word1 as a prefix
tag:word1 -word2 - find bookmarks with tag word1, but not word2 anywhere
tag:word1 tag:word2 - find bookmarks with both tag word1 and tag word2
tag:(word1 word2) - same as above
tag:word1 -tag:word2 - find bookmarks with tag word1, but not tag word2
tag:”word1 word2″ - find bookmarks with the phrase “word1 word2″ in tags
title: word1 - find bookmarks with word1 in title
text:word1 - find bookmarks with word1 in text
c:word1 - find bookmarks with word1 in comments
h:word1 - find bookmarks with word1 in highlights

Once again using this to tag your blog posts is handy, you wouldn’t have trouble finding any of your blog posts.

Integration

Blog - Highlight a page and mouse click blog this, it will open a new blog post and insert the hyperlinks and text

Linkroll - re-syndicate the latest

Tagroll - coming soon

Similtaneous tagging - you can set it to save a bookmark in up to 9 other bookmark services everytime you save a page to Diigo…in my trial it seems to just save in a default or first tag (so you’d have to go to your other services and re-tag)

Blog synch - I wonder if it will save a blog post at the time of publishing your blog post…if so this could be a consideration of using Diigo to bookmark my blog posts (just wait for the Tagroll).
Even if you have to manually bookmark your blog posts, at least you can do this to 9 services at once and then later choose which service you really want to use…just this feature alone could be another product.

This is an awesome tool, some of the features, like the toolbar and the synching go beyond the call of duty

…it seems there will be some more social features coming soon like contacts/groups.

I like the idea of groups as Diigo will extend from personal research to a group research…at the moment you can share/forward your bookmarks, but the annotation viewing choices are either none, yours, or all.
In a group environment you could foward someone your annotated bookmarks or they could just login to the group account, and inturn annotate the same page, and hopefully the toolbar would let you view annotations from your group only (kind of has a wiki feel to it).

More coverage:
Library Stuff
Corante Web Hub Editorial
TechCrunch
Solution Watch

[ADDED: I’d like to see folders like Clipmarks, Spurl, netvouz, this way I can have channels or different research portfolios…bookmarks could live in multiple folders and have any tag, but I like the idea of having a bucket for a research project (all the bookmarks for that project in one URL).
I could use a tag as a bucket, but I’d rather a defined section for this purpose.]