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New features in Diigo 4!

November 1, 2009 If you were out trick or treating yesterday afternoon, you likely missed Diigo's Maggie Tsai on Classroom 2.0 Live.  Happily, the chat is archived!  And, if you haven't tried Diigo yet, this is absolutely the right time.

Diigo's motto is research, share, collaborate and now it allows us all to do all stuff that even better. The acronym stands for: Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.

Diigo allows us to create and share very convenient and flexible online research journals.  These research journals may be built to organize our own information needs and lives, or shared with others for particular projects or interests. It allows us to bookmark, highlight, annotate, organize, and share Web content easily through a handy toolbar or a diigolet.

I am currently a relatively shy Diigo user.  I started the Teacher-Librarians group and I belong to: Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom, Diigo in Education, Educators, History Teachers,  Web 2.0 @ School, Project-Based Learning, , eLearning 2.0 and High School Librarians.   Nearly every morning I discover links to share with colleagues and use the links my colleagues share with teachers and students at Springfield. 

You may want to begin as a shy user too, begin exploring links for your own professional and personal use.  Start a group for your school or your Social Studies teachers, for instance.

But on the Classroom 2.0 Live session yesterday, teacher Russ Goerend shared his use of Diigo with his 6th grade students and it occurred to me that I needed to speed up my own plans to roll out use of Diigo as a research tool across our school.

I love that we can work safely and interactively with learners using the Teacher Console.  Diigo's FAQs for eductation offer a toolkit of resources including handy tutorials.

Here's what I learned yesterday about Diigo 4  (The Diigo Blog describes all these new features in detail.)
  • New user interface — features three main areas — My Library, My Network and My Groups — relate to the key value propositions of Diigo: Research, Sharing, and Collaboration.  New display options — compact, standard and power edit — also make the rich feature set more easily accessible.
  • Snapshots on demand — The established approach to bookmarking is complemented by Diigo’s version 4’s new archiving capability to capture and archive entire web pages — even dynamic and password-protected content. . .
  • Improved search — Users now have a vastly improved search utility, which allows them to toggle between several modes in their libraries. Filtering by tags gives the most specific results, but users can also search by full text, by a combination of criteria (tags, annotations, and URL), or perform advanced searches with custom criteria. For more advanced searches, ten criteria are available. . .
  • Improved Annotations features and user interface - A new function allows users to turn their mouse pointer into a highlighting pen, which is now available in multiple colors so that groups or individual paragraphs can be easily differentiated. Also, improved icons for annotations, improved view annotation filters, and a new highlight menu, provide greater flexibility for Diigo users who prefer a custom approach to sticky notes.
  • Simple, powerful, learning networks — Users of Diigo 4 benefit from a streamlined and highly effective approach to bookmark-oriented networking with friends, collaborators and other people of interest. The old two-way approach to establishing a relationship is replaced by a single action: Follow. Within the resulting Network, a flow of bookmarks — including your own — provides a close to real-time view of the activities and interests of these people. Creation or annotation of any bookmark causes it to rise to the forefront in all associated networks. In any person’s network — not just your own — you can preview, filter by tag, add comments and more.
  • Group knowledge repositories and discussions — Version 4 greatly increases the capabilities of the Diigo platform for group knowledge and collaboration. Integration, filters, sort options, greatly improved support for tags, highly focused search results, group snapshots and other refinements make Diigo group work both productive and enjoyable. . .
  • Diigo meta — Annotated preview, bookmarking history with per-user tags, highlights and sticky notes, personal annotations, public annotations, public comments, tag cloud, and more. The Meta page appears by default when you browse the library of any other user. Other routes to Diigo Meta include the Share menu and the Snapshots page for a bookmark.
  • iPhone® application — users can now access their Diigo libraries from the iPhone and iPod touch®, plus download for offline browsing! (Coming soon ~ pending approval by App Store)
  • Other improvements — Diigo 4 brings a wide range of additional improvements including multi-word tagging, improved tag editing, smarter approaches to moderation, plus lots more!  We will try to highlight and showcase many of the new changes in future posts.
Another thing I discovered yesterday, courtesy of Buffy Hamilton, was that Diigo does play nice with our password-protected subscription databases.  The trick is to use the durable/permanent URL provided on the document page rather than the URL generated automatically by your search.  That works!

This is a research tool school librarians should embrace and teach. 

I love that Diigo's Maggie and Wade always listen to the ideas of educators. So here's one more request.

I'd love for Diigo to play nice with third party citation generators like:
 How cool would it be if students could simply select the bookmarks they want and automatically create  works cited or consulted lists?

Now, what should we do about print?  Can we bookmark it?  Should we worry?  What do you think?

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on November 1, 2009 | Comments (2)


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November 1, 2009
In response to: New features in Diigo 4!
DonnaBaratta commented:

Great updates! Still looking for a utility with similar features for pdf files.




November 5, 2009
In response to: New features in Diigo 4!
Fred commented:

For similar online highlighting and annotation features on PDF files you could try: A.nnotate.com





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