The name “Diigo” is an abbreviation for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” Diigo (dee’go) is about “social annotation”, a superset of social bookmarking. Diigo is aiming to transform the entire web into a writable and participatory media.
The social annotation service introduced by Diigo allows users to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page they read. Imagine a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. Users can write on the transparency as they wish, as private notes or public comments. And they can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their “two cents” and interact with them.
The benefits of Diigo’s social annotation service can be seen from several angles.
- It is clearly a useful personal tool, providing a virtual highlighter and pen for users as they browse the web.
- It is a great collaborative tool as it allows users to easily forward annotated pages and interact on them in groups.
- It provides a superior social bookmarking service since it can “clips” the highlights and store them with the bookmarks. As a result, you can now do full-text search on “clipped” or highlighted contents only, in addition to searching in tags, titles, comments, and the entire pages.
- It provides a powerful social platform as it connects readers of similar interests and enables their easy interactions.
The social annotation service is enabled by the Diigo toolbar (on IE, Firefox and Flock) , and the Diigo.com website. Diigo toolbar provides some additional unique and powerful features:
- A fully customizable search tool that allows you to access any speciality search quickly
- Content selection menu makes it extremely convenient to interact with every word on a web page – highlight, search, look up – whatever you you want!
- Ability to bookmark to several other bookmarking services and the local folder simultaneously
Come check us out. We welcome you to the Diigo community!
