DiRT (Digital Research Tools) has a new home! Please visit Bamboo DiRT to explore this excellent collection of research tools.

Web site: http://www.diigo.com/index

Date of first review/ name of reviewer: 5/6/08 [Lisa Spiro]

Additional reviewer(s): Tyler Manolovitz

Produced by: Diigo

Cost: Free

Description: "Diigo is two services in one -- it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other.... Diigo provides a browser add-on that can really improve your research productivity. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages.... You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues."

Platform: web-based

License: ??? Commercial service

Maturity: v3 beta (pretty stable)

Features:

Digitally highlight information
Attach sticky notes to any location on a page
Save a cached image of bookmarked pages
Advanced searching and easy bookmark retrieval
Share bookmarks with friends and colleagues vie e-mail
Collaborate or share bookmarks by joining or creating groups
Organize bookmarks in a list like Internet Explorer Favorites
Bookmarks accessible from any machine on any browser, with or without Diigo installed
Easily import your existing bookmarks from Internet Explorer or Firefox

Advantages:

Much more convenient than storing bookmarks on your local computer or creating documents with lists of links to be shared with colleagues. Diigo allows you to bookmark a web page and share your bookmarks online with one click.
You can discover relevant content by following tags applied by other Diigo users.
Digital highlighting and sticky notes are unique to Diigo

Disadvantages:

Currently Diigo has a smaller user base than some other social bookmarking tools, so you can't yet discover as much content by looking at resources that other users have bookmarked.
Ads are displayed on the right sidebar--in a fairly subtle way, but it can be a little annoying.

Tips:

Download the Diigo toolbar directly from the Diigo site; as of April 2008, the version of the toolbar available directly from Firefox was buggy.
You can easily import bookmarks from delicious and sync Diigo with delicious, so that you can continue automatically adding bookmarks to your delicious account via Diigo.
If the default title assigned to a bookmark (derived from the title of the web page) is vague, change it. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding that bookmark later.
Tag wisely. Establish your own conventions--if a term has several words, do you add an _ between each word? Do you use singular (tool) or plural (tools)?

Tutorials:

http://www.diigo.com/help/flash_tutorial

More information: