These past few weeks have certainly been eventful & “earthshaking” … Diigo is a global company with our HQ in Reno, NV, USA and our R&D center in China (not outsourced, but an integral part of our team.) About 3 weeks ago, the Reno area experienced a 4.7 earthquake, and in a private conversation someone from out of the area joked that’s “shaking” on how well received the latest Diigo release has been.
On Monday, May 12, at 2:28pm Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. To give some perspective on how severe 7.9 magnitude is on the Richter scale: according to wikipedia, it’s equivalent to 600 megatons of TNT explosive, or energy released by the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption! Mother Earth has lot of unsettling energy!
Our R&D center is based in Chengdu, only 90 km from the epicenter. When the quake hit, our whole team was still in a heated discussion on features in our regular international conference meeting (yes, we work very long and odd hours, and skype / gtalk are wonderful must-have tools …) All of a sudden, very loud rattling sound came through. Our team in Chengdu said calmly over skype, “There is an earthquake, we have to get out of here.” So I thought, well, it must be another one of those small tremors, so I kept skype connected, hoping to hear from them again soon.
Shortly, news broke - a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, hit the area, and Chengdu is only 90 kilometers from the epicenter! That got our US team really worried. Fortunately, we were able to connect with our Chengdu team a few hours later, and learned they are all safe and sound.
And it looks like they all had a unforgettable experience. One team member recalled, “As I ran down the stairs from the 27th floor of the 33-story highrise, the building twisted and turned, bubbled up and down, for a few minutes which really felt like forever. The building was making those scary cracking sound, making me think that it would just fall any minute before I got out.”
While our team members are all fine, their office and apartment buildings have suffered some damage, and being such tall buildings, we judged that it would not be safe to stay there while there are after-shocks still happening daily. So they are now temporarily housed in the ground floor of a hotel, with a rather unstable internet connection. So until they settle down more comfortably, our new development work will be slowed down quite a bit.
Our latest upgrade happened in the midst of communication interruption, so we had to temporarily roll back. All very bad timing and sorry about any temporary inconvenience. The good thing is that our operation is all based in the US, so that our service is not interrupted. Some of our teammates are certainly a bit shaken up, but knock on wood, everyone is all fine, and we will all be back to full swing in no time!
The earthquake was so strong and devastating, it was felt throughout very widespread areas, destroyed many buildings, as well as infrastructure like roads, bridges, communication towers, etc. There are also tons of after shocks, the highest one measuring at 6.1 magnitude. According to the latest official report, over 14,000 people have died, over 25,000 people still buried under collapsed buildings, and many more have been injured or are missing. Most sadly, many children were in school at the time, got buried under the rubble of their collapsed school buildings, and precious moments are escaping for their rescue. A Major calamity indeed!
The past few days have not been easy for me, as I have been traveling on the road, and just have a chance to sit down and write this blog post now. Our prayers are with all the people impacted by this tragedy. We’re doing Diigo because we thought we could make some difference to the world of internet users… Given the severity of this Sichuan earthquake, and at time like this, one realizes how precious our life is and what our loved ones, friends, and families mean to us. We are sharing our story, and doing what we can as individuals and as a company for each other, and for people of the affected community. We’d also like to appeal and urge people to consider donating & helping the needy. Please share this news. For more information, please visit the American Red Cross.
Thank you very much, and we appreciate your kind support!
We had a blast meeting with David LaPlante, chairman of the State of Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and CEO of Twelve Horses and his crew, Mike Henderson, Earl Spriggs & Leilani Schweitzer. Twelve Horses is a full-service relationship marketing and messaging company specializing in designing interactive communication solutions.
It’s great knowing that many workgroups and companies are discovering and finding Diigo to be quite useful for both personal productivity and effective collaborative research… reasons that inspire us to create Diigo in the very first place. Besides “What is / Why Diigo”, we also chatted about “Why Reno / Tahoe”
To find out the inside scoop, be sure to check out our interview and podcast
more friends’ bookmarks menu items (All Friends, contact list)
send to window: message is public by default. privacy setting is remembered
twitter this now works in firefox 3.0pre (but not in beta 5)
fixed several compatibility issues with firefox 3
other fixes and improvements
Ver 3.1.4
resolved conflict with snaplinks caused by a Firefox 2 bug
faster upload when importing bookmarks from browser
fixed a bug in “Send to blog”
“Bookmark this Link to Diigo” now fetches link title and url correctly
changed default message of “Twitter this”
added “Add a floating sticky note” in right-click menu
fixed broken Search url (search bookmarks on Diigo)
Search result now uses current tab instead of opening a new tab
highlighting in Gmail is not allowed because highlighting in such large one page applications is confusing and ineffective
minor bug fixes and UI improvements
Ver 3.1.3
resolved conflict with iMacro
fixed an XSS vulnerability in comment content processing
Ver 3.1.2
Welcome to Diigo Toolbar 3.0! This is our most significant upgrade of the toolbar since its first release in 2006, culminating many months of development and test. Hope you will like it!
What’s new:
UI redesign Toolbar buttons, menu layout and bookmark window have been redesigned to provide better usability.
New sidebar You can search and access your bookmarks easily in the new sidebar. You can also view, filter and add annotations in the sidebar.
Social browsing Diigo Toolbar now enables a social browsing experience. While you are reading a web page, the Diigo sidebar shows you who else has bookmarked that page or that site, and what other similar pages and sites they have bookmarked, giving you a great way to find related content.
Multiple ways to share bookmarks with varying degrees of intrusiveness Share bookmarks via Friends’ Bookmarks, Specially shared bookmarks, the new Diigo messaging system, or to a selected contact list, or through twitter and facebook.
Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Numerous other small improvements
Check out the new features and enhancements, and HELP for more info.
Let us know what you think of this new version at http://groups.diigo.com/Diigo_HQ/forum
We’re delighted to learn that Tim O’Connor who is currently the Strategic Sourcing Lead for Capgemini, one of the largest management and IT consulting firms, has been invited to present at ERE Expo 2008 and will be featuring Diigo in his talk on April 2nd in San Diego. ERE Expo is the premier gathering for those in the HR / Recruiting / Sourcing industry. Broad range of the most recent and relevant issues currently affecting the global recruiting industry will be discussed.
SESSION DESCRIPTION
In this session, O’Connor introduces you to Diigo, a site that allows you create your own database of candidates on line for free. Diigo was not created with the thought of recruiting in mind, but he explains how it can be a hidden gem for a few select recruiters and researchers in the U.S. who have been lucky enough to understand how to get the most of it. You’ll learn how to do Boolean searches across multiple search engines in just seconds. You’ll learn more about bookmarks and tags. You’ll learn how to create your own database of candidates online.
SESSION TIME
April 2nd, 1:30pm
A related quote from a recruiting specialist, Michael Marlatt, who is using Diigo extensively as he’s constantly sourcing for talent on from the web:
“Whether I am surfing the web, sourcing for resumes or conducting competitive intelligence, Diigo allows me to quickly capture relevant data, create annotations, keep it all organized, easily retrievable, simultaneously share (real-time) content with my team, and oh by the way I can do this without my personal computer from anywhere in the world. The days of simply book-marking favorites in a browser (old-school) and creating “bookmarklets” is definitely not efficient. This is especially true if you have 100’s (if not 1000’s) of favorite sites stored in your current browser. Diigo has vastly simplified how I maintain and share content from the web.”
We’re glad to hear that people are discovering ways that Diigo makes their lives easier everyday. Indeed, Diigo is not merely just another bookmarking, web annotation, etc, etc. tool and site. It is designed very much with research and productivity in mind, as it actually arose out of our personal needs to read and digest large amount of information online and the need to share thoughts and interact on those information. For those browse or consume a lot information on the web, we believe they will find Diigo quite indispensable.
It’s fantastic that more and more people are sharing their Diigo experience in workshops / conferences across various disciplines and industries! If you’re going to be at ERE Expo and you would like to see Diigo in action, then drop by Tim’s discussion this Wed afternoon!
One concern of Diigo 3.0 users we hear about is this: ” I already have trouble keeping up with all the other social networks such as Linkedin and Facebook. Why should I maintain yet another social network on Diigo?”
First of all, it is completely ok to be anti-social on Diigo. In this “anti-social mode”, Diigo as simply a great research tool that can really enhance your productivity ~ it is the best web bookmarking and annotation tool you will find. No other social network can make the same claim.
Second, and more importantly, most of the “social” things happening on Diigo do not require any extra effort from you — they are just there to augment your information discovery and sharing. Say for example, you are now browsing the web to learn more about the subject of elearning. You found a few resources on the subject, which you annotated and tagged “elearning”, and now reviewing your findings by the tag “elearning”, you see that you can also view the popular and most recent resources on e-learning from the entire Diigo community. You can also see who are the top contributors on this subject, and what groups are interested in this subject. You can then add these top contributors as your friends or to your watch lists so you will automatically get the latest information they find on elearning. Think of how powerful a “knowledge filter” this aspect can be given the quality of content searched.
If you choose to invite some friends to Diigo, you can keep in touch with them without any extra effort. You will automatically see what their latest interests are from their most recent public bookmarks, which of course can also be an excellent source of information for you. If any associate makes any comment on pages you also bookmarked, you will be notified, giving you a chance to learn their opinion and interact with them as you choose.
In a sense, Diigo is more like “unintentional social networking” that requires minimal effort, as opposed to “intentional social networking” such as Linkedin and Facebook, which do require a lot of effort to maintain. Diigo simply integrates people and knowledge seamlessly making socializing a choice rather than a condition.
We appreciate how “precious” everyone’s computer desktop space is. Some people are even reluctant to install any browser extension / toolbar because of that concern. So we have made our toolbar quite flexible. Below we use Firefox to illustrate the many ways the Diigo toolbar can be customized. Customization with Internet Explorer is somewhat different, but equally versatile.
The default look of the Diigo Toolbar is as follows:
If you think this is taking too much of your screen space, you can customize it in many ways.
Option 1:
You can have as many or as few Diigo buttons as you need on your desktop. Just pick and choose which button(s) you need by going to Diigo toolbar (Diigo >> Options >> Toolbar & Menu >> Select toolbar Buttons):
Option 2:
Completely hide the Diigo toolbar (go to View >> Toolbars) and only use the context menu and content selection menu.
Option 3:
Merge the Diigo toolbar with another toolbar. For example, Go to View >> Toolbars >> Customize, and then drag the bookmark toolbar items onto the Diigo toolbar, and then hide the bookmark toolbar. See below.
In fact, you can save more screen space by removing the built-in search box and merge the rest of the navigation bar to the top bar, and then hide the navigation bar, resulting in the following set-up that is extremely compact and handy
Option 4:
You can also drag any of the buttons on the Diigo toolbar and move them to other bars, then hide the Diigo toolbar. In the screenshot below, the Diigo button is moved to the top bar, and the Diigo toolbar is hidden
With the launch of Diigo 3.0 to rave reviews, some people also wonder if Diigo has become too social, too “facebookish.” Regarding this concern, we would like to make the following points:
Facebook is about “who you know”, while Diigo is about “what you know”. Diigo is a community centered around information and knowledge sharing - all social features in Diigo are designed to serve the purpose of better collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
Facebook connects people based on their existing relationships and affiliations, while Diigo connects people based on common interests in information and content.
Diigo gives users broader latitude in terms of “being social” or not. At one extreme, you can be completely “anti-social” and use Diigo mainly as a research tool for personal productivity — surely you cannot be completely anti-social on Facebook! Diigo provides users with many options on how to share information with others and how to get information from others and the community, involving varying degrees of effort and intrusiveness. This point has been explained very well in a recent blog post at ehub.
Bottomline? Diigo is a new kind of social network centered around information and knowledge, and is perhaps best referred to as a “social information network“.
Diigo is evolving and innovating rapidly. So stay tuned, as lots more exciting things will be forthcoming!
PS: In this new V3 release, we do provide a Facebook widget. For those who have a Facebook account, click here to check it out!
If you’re in a hurry, the Diigo toolbar offers the “One-Click Save” button. Some of you may wonder “what happened to the “QuickD” button in the old toolbar? Well, here are a few changes we believe will help improve the usability:
The “One-Click Save” button now serves two purposes:
Rapid Bookmarking
It replaces the QuickD button in the previous version. Clicking the “One-Click Save” button while visiting a website will automatically save the bookmark to your “My Bookmarks” section without the usual Bookmark pop-up window. The default tag is currently set as “no-tag“. (Tip: all bookmarks tagged under “no-tag” can be easily pulled up in your “My Bookmarks” section » use the “Untagged” tab for batch editing at a later time.) You can also change the default tag for the “One-Click Save” operation by setting it under the Bookmark button » “One-Click Save Options”
Bookmarking Icon Status
If you have already bookmarked a webpage, a red bookmark will appear.
(Tip: any annotation changes will now be reflected on the “Comment” icon as well as on the new sidebar.)
Also, a related topic: there is now a better way to view a “Filtered bookmark list” in the new sidebar vs. the previous version. We will cover that topic in a separate Tip in this series.
Recommended Tags, Add to List / Group, Share with friend, Twitterthis ~ just to name a few ~ all these are just one click away within the new bookmarking window!
To learn more about various bookmarking options in Diigo, plesae visit our new “Bookmarking Help” page.
The completely re-designed Diigo toolbar now offers a more intuitive user interface for beginners and lots more power features for advanced power users as well. We hope we’ve struck a nice balance for all. And of course, don’t forget to check out the new awesome sidebar within the new toolbar (more tips to come soon.)
Before we begin, please make sure you’ve installed the latest toolbar from the Diigo toolbar download page… Although our system should auto-update if you have previously installed an earlier version of the diigo toolbar, you can double check whether you have the latest one by looking up your toolbar version # (in toolbar: Diigo >> Help >> About) against the version number on the main Diigo toolbar download page.
Note: a few users have reported sign-in problem. Most likely it’s due to the fact that somehow your system prevents a proper auto-update. If that’s the case, we’d recommend that you re-install the latest toolbar. You should be in good shape after the re-install. If not, please let us know.
Now, the Diigo button: with the right pull down menu, the new Diigo button allows you to easily access all important areas of Diigo. Here are few changes from the previous version:
This replaces the earlier version of the Diigo button that carried out dynamic functions. Each function now has its own button for a more intuitive user experience. We will elaborate more on each of the functions in other tips in this series.
Once the Diigo toolbar is installed, much of the functions can also be conveniently accessed through the context menu (also known as the right-click menu). The context (right-click) menu is also more streamlined compared with the previous version:
When you’re ready to bookmark a page, right-click, and you will see “Bookmark this page” to Diigo.
If you select a block of text then right-click, you will then see “Highlight” and “Highlight and Bookmark“
Of course, don’t forget about the sometimes overlooked, but very, very useful diigo “Content Selection Menu” - which we will cover in a separate tip in this series.
