Add comments as you browse

A new service called Diigo, which – in all seriousness – stands for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff" allows you to add comments as you browse. It works similarly to bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us. Where it really comes into its own, however, is web annotation: the ability to highlight text and images, or add ‘sticky notes’ (a bit like online Post-its) to any webpage.

Before we look at annotation though, there are few things that Diigo does with bookmarks that make it stand out. It’s like the Swiss army knife of web browsing.

• You can store all your bookmarks online so you are no longer tied to the browser on one computer when it comes to finding information that you’ve bookmarked. Additionally, Diigo will store a copy of the page as it was when you viewed it. That means no more going back to a page to look something up again only to find that it’s not there any more.
• If you are already using Del.icio.us or another similar service, there’s no need to stop. You can set this clever web application to simultaneously add a page to Del.icio.us when you add it to Diigo.
• If you’ve read something that perhaps you would like to add to your blog simply right-click and then choose ‘blog this’.
• There are a number of other very useful features on the right-click menu. For example if you read something you think someone else would like to see you can right-click on it and then email the page directly to them. Or if you highlight it the Diigo menu appears automatically and just the highlighted text is sent, and of course added to your list of bookmarks automatically.

As mentioned above, the really exciting feature here is web annotation. If you’re carrying out online research, or perhaps collaborating on a project, it’s a very powerful tool. Imagine looking at your website and deciding what you need your web editor to update. With Diigo all you have to do is highlight some text and add a note telling them what the text should be changed to.

You can keep your highlights and notes private so they’re just for you to see or allow other users to see and interact with them. You can even choose whether or not you see anybody else’s notes if you don’t want to be interrupted while browsing.

Try it out at and let us know if you come up with any other uses.

Diigo