Diigo (pronounced dee’go) is an online platform with the goal of helping you create your own personal online knowledge library. Sounds pretty vague right?
Diigo is actually an abbreviation for “Digest of Internet information, Groups and Other stuff”. Yeah, I didn’t come up with the name. If it were up to me the name would have been something similar to other products in social bookmarking “when it was cool” like Delicious or Digg. The net overall has moved away from using social bookmarking as an SEO tool since the big G changed their algorithm and social bookmarking stopped being an effective way of increasing site rankings. This change also effectively killed many sites based on that function.
This is an aspect that differentiates Diigo from all the other sites though, as we are still fully operational and have tried our best to adapt to the ever changing needs of our users. I cannot call Diigo a startup, as we have been active for almost 10 years. We are a boot strapped company, and have never looked for external funding. We’ve never been acquired. We are not from Silicon Valley. We’ve had the same CEO this whole time, with team members that have been with us for 6+ years.
Some members of the tech community would consider a company in our position in “startup purgatory”. The way we look at it is that we really want to see our small vision of filling in what we view as a missing feature from the world wide web, “your own personalized layer of the internet”.
There are some sites now that are pursuing similar goals in terms of a personalized, annotated layer of the internet. Did you know this was a crucial part of the original vision the web was supposed to have? Some have made decent progress, more have kicked the bucket. Our goal is to evolve from “social bookmarking” to allowing users to easily create their own personal online information library.
This vision is what keeps Diigo going. Social bookmarking is still a big part of Diigo, Highlights and on-page notes are staple features in this product genre. More and more products are implementing an outline based platform for online information management. What we aim to achieve is bringing all these functions together into one, simple online learning platform. That’s why we are working on a complete revamp of our entire website/UI and adding features that meet users’ current needs. We know this has been long over due. We appreciate all of our users, old and new alike. Let me know what keeps you using Diigo, and what you would like to see us evolve into.
Diigo 
I have been using Diigo since Beta, and have thousands of bookmarks and annotations. Inevitably, some pages have disappeared over the years (that’s the nature of the Web), but it is still a valuable library for research and teaching.
I use Diigo with almost all my classes (College level) as well as for my own research projects. I share current events with students, highlighting and commenting on news relevant to what we are studying, and encouraging them to really engage with topics, rather than being passive consumers of information: Diigo is a great tool for that.
Many of my students over the years have kept using Diigo after taking classes with me for their own ongoing research projects. And the Diigo groups I have built up for each class/subject serve as a community library that grows over time and connects generations of students who have studied that topic.
I am still mourning the loss of Lists. That is the only misstep (in my view) I have seen you guys make in all the time I have been a user. I continue to be an advocate and daily user, and will continue to use the service with my classes as long as this remains a good project for higher education.
Thanks for your support. We will keep doing our best to improve Diigo for educational purposes. Let me know if you have any input for our revamp in progress.
Signed Up for a free Diigo account today. It is really an easy to operate system that will definitely help me organize online resources I need.
Thank You!
This looks like a tool worth some consideration. However in reading the other reviews it appears there may be a little updating needed and certainly room for growth. Thank you for the comprehensive overview.