Turn the Web Into a Shareable Notepad with Diigo
January 16th, 2008 in Product Reviews
by: Matthew Griffin
Back in July I wrote an article called . MyStickies allows you to paste virtual sticky notes on websites and then share them with others. It's a simple concept but in the proceeding months I ditched Basecamp (no offense Jason Fried—I love your stuff) and began using MyStickies exclusively to collaborate on web projects. MyStickies doesn't do everything Basecamp does. But what it does, it does well. MyStickies was easily my favorite Firefox extension, that is, until I found Diigo "Social Annotation".
Diigo builds on the MyStickies concept and fuses it with a social bookmarking system similar to Del.icio.us. The result is the best web-clipping/collaboration/bookmarking/thought-organizing tool out there. Once you've installed Diigo, you'll get a Diigo tool bar at the top of your browser. Diigo also offers a little javascript link you can drag into your links bar that essentially does the same thing without taking up as much room. Using the Diigo tool bar you can highlight text on a web page, add sticky notes, bookmark and tag a page, and see public comments made by other Diigo users.
But the feature that catapults Diigo into the stratosphere in my mind is its ability to search annotations. If you do any blogging, I'm sure you know why this is such a helpful tool. Now I can annotate facts and figures on web pages and tag them. In the future, when I desperately need references and links for an article, I have a whole database of searchable stickies and bookmarks. When I return to the web pages I've annotated, there are all my notes and highlights. Also, since all of my Diigo data is out in the cloud, I can access it from any computer.
Using Diigo is definitely another step into the cloud. There's always the chance that I will wake up one day and find that all of notes and bookmarks have vanished. In the meantime, though, it's such a helpful tool, the risk is worth it.
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Comments
Posted By: Michael Marlatt on 03/28/08
Hi. I've been using Diigo extensively and it has been by far the most widely used web application that I am leveraging on a daily basis. Diigo has vastly simplified how I maintain and share web content with my peers. For anyone who has not yet tried it, you should check it out.
Posted By: Alex on 11/05/08
Matthew, I found this post and was curious if you'd like to try a similar product called WebNotes? It's more focused on being a research tool as opposed to a "social annotation" tool, so I think you might find it useful. Let me know and I can set you up with a free account!
Posted By: Matthew Grffin on 11/05/08
Thanks, Alex. I'll be sure to check it out.