I have to admit I’ve been taking Diigo for granted lately. It’s one of those tools you use automatically and while I use it daily, my life has been so hectic that I haven’t taken the time to stop and look around for a while. As a result, I’m just learning that there are more fabulous tools to make our online research efforts even easier. You may have noticed Diigo has updated the interface to a cleaner style. That’s just the beginning. They have added features, services and applications to make an indispensable tool even better.
The Networking function works much like Twitter – you follow interesting people and receive updates when they bookmark sites. Groups have been given a much cleaner interface making it easy to navigate and find specific bookmarks. They have now created several widgets for groups including a badge, linkroll, tag roll and auto-post.
Diigo now offers two levels of premium accounts and an educators account along with the free account. All the features current Diigo users enjoy are still available. The premium accounts provide additional features like full-text search, saving images from web pages, no ads and text-only views. The basic account is $20/year and the premium account is $40/year.
Quick Note Mac App
Diigo’s Quick Note app [free - Mac & Chrome] offers a great way to take notes while you’re browsing web sites. This isn’t just notes about a bookmark, but notes on anything you want to grab. How many times have you wanted a note pad on your screen? Now you’ve got it! You can find it in the Mac App Store and at the Chrome Web Store.
The Diigo iPad application in action.
The Diigo iPad app [free] presents all your bookmarks, images and notes in a well-designed interface and lets you visit each bookmark without leaving the app. In this example, I’m looking at my bookmarks tagged “Florida” and have selected the Niles’ national register bookmark. The overlay shown here appeared when I clicked the Edit button in the top right corner and allows me to edit any of the bookmark information I’ve saved. You can’t see it behind the overlay, but this is the information that appears in the work area for each selected item. Notice too that from the action menu I can open the link in the browser or mail, copy or delete it. Groups are not included in the app – yet. Hopefully it won’t be long.
If you haven’t updated your Diigo toolbar lately, do it now. Unfortunately, Safari users are still limited to a bookmarklet, but even it has been improved. Diigo continues to show the way for managing online research.
