Web 2.0 - Diigo

For me, conducting research on the Internet has always involved hours of searching, taking notes, and keeping track of sources. To make my research time more productive, I’ve experimented with many tools that claim to streamline this process. Most recently, I signed up for a free account from Diigo.com. Diigo is an innovative website tagging system, which allows users to “take their notes” directly on any website.

The signup process is quick and painless, requiring only a username, email address, and password. Submitting the request generates an automated email with an activation link, which when clicked completes the enrollment process.

Clicking the activation link takes the user to the installation page. Diigo supports all of the mainstream web browsers including Firfox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Flock. Installation involves simply dragging the “diigolet” (applet) for your appropriate browser onto your bookmarks bar, which creates a Diigolet entry. That’s it, installation complete.

In order to test the installation, I used a friend’s blog as an example, http://steve-chadwick.blogspot.com. Once at the test site, clicking the Diigolet entry on the bookmarks bar brings up the applet (shown at the top of the page in the image below).



The first feature to explore is bookmark/share. When clicked, it allows the user to create a bookmark to the site, including annotations, and also allows the user to mark the bookmark as private, public, or it can be shared to user-selected/created groups.

If you select text on the page, and then click highlight, the text will be highlighted, just as expected. The highlights are persistent, meaning if you revisit the site afterwards, the highlighting will remain.

Clicking the Comments button will bring up a list of all shared Diigo annotations, organized by type. Clicking About This Page will bring up a Diigo compiled popularity report.

Clicking on More >> My Bookmarks brings up an organized list of all bookmarked pages. From here, users can manage their account, create groups, and even send annotated bookmarks directly to their blog. Diigo currently supports WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Movable Type, Windows Live Spaces, and Drupal.



Diigo is an excellent research tool for individuals, and probably even more valuable for groups who share research interests. Diigo’s collaboration features enables Web 2.0-like functionality for any website.