News

Diigo Welcomes its 7th Million User with a Major Redesign

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Diigo Welcomes its 7th Million User with a Major Redesign
~ heightening its focus on being a “multi-tool” for knowledge management

Diigo was started as a simple social bookmarking service in 2005, and is now widely regarded as the most widely used and most robust web annotation tool in the world. By steadily enhancing its offerings beyond bookmarking/annotation to include web archiving, image/screenshot markup, group collaboration, improved information organization and presentation, and mobile apps, Diigo has effectively become an integrated “multi-tool” for personal knowledge management (PKM).

Diigo, as a multi-tool for PKM, now touches on the entire workflow for knowledge-oriented information consumption, from browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing, to connecting dots into knowledge – a workflow that we believe is still largely ad-hoc and inefficient.  Diigo is here to streamline this workflow and dramatically improve your productivity.

The current redesign includes the following:

  • a complete site redesign which includes numerous usability and aesthetic improvements

  • a redesign of the company logo and brand image to emphasize our focus on personal knowledge management.

  • a complete redesign of Diigo Web Collector, our flagship browser extension on Chrome browser.

  • a major update to Diigo Browser on iOS, which provides the best web reading and annotating experience on iPad and iPhone (coming soon)

As Diigo has steadily became more versatile and powerful, it has also steadily grown its user base, amassing 7 million registered users,  with more than 350 million items saved and 100 million pieces of annotations.  Our users include law firms, marketing agencies, consultants, recruiters, web designers, researchers, students, teachers … — basically anyone who do a lot of knowledge-oriented information consumption, either individually or as a team, either professionally, or for personal purposes such as reading and researching related to travel, health, shopping, career, hobbies, news, online learning, smart investing, school papers, work projects, etc, etc.

Going forward, the Diigo team aims to evolve Diigo into the best personal knowledge management system (PKM) on the market, providing unsurpassed capabilities for the collection, compilation, organization, digestion, presentation and collaboration of knowledge and information.

Scheduled Website Maintenance

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As part of our continued effort to upgrade our infrastructure, we have planned a two-step maintenance update. The first one is this weekend, and next one will be scheduled in 2 to 3 months.

The first outage window is this weekend: Friday June 8th 10:00PM to June 9th 3:00AM US Pacific Time (GMT: 6:00AM to 2:00PM GMT Sat June 9th). Each outage will be approximately 15-30 minutes each. Diigo will not be accessible during this period.

PS: Follow us on Twitter for whispers, early news, reviews, and updates from Diigo!

Scheduled Website Maintenance

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Please note that we will doing a system upgrade on June 20 around 00:00 PST  (Sunday midnight) for few hours.  Diigo will not be accessible during this period.

Thanks for your patience while we make this upgrade to make Diigo better and better, and thanks for your continued support! 

ps: Follow us on Twitter for whispers, early news, reviews, and updates from Diigo!

Diigo updates its “free + premium” model

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We very much value and appreciate the feedback that many users have shared with us about our recent move to the freemium model. As a result, we are introducing some changes to the price/feature matrix.

In particular, the “Free” plan has been enhanced by increasing the number of highlights and enabling limited page cache, screen capture, etc. A cheaper plan, called “Basic”, at $20/year, has been introduced. We’ve also taken special consideration of the needs of educators and those accounts continue to be free and have access to all of the core Diigo functionalties (namely, bookmarking, annotations, lists, and groups), and lots more (special educator features and some advanced functions). For details, please check out the updated product offerings table.

We believe the new plans should help accommodate even greater flexibility for users of various needs. Of course, for users who have already upgraded and desire to switch to a different plan, please contact us. We’ll be happy to assist.

New premium features and more forthcoming

Text view: Along with the new changes mentioned above, we are glad to release another great feature for premium account users: “Text View” that removes the clutter around what you are reading and displays a clean, readable view. To learn more, make sure to check it out!

Upload cached pages through diigolet: “Upload cached pages” feature was previously only available on Diigo FF and IE toolbar. Now this feature is also available in diigolet, so it works on any browsers. When you bookmark a page to Diigo, you can choose to upload the page, even if it is dynamic or hidden behind the password protection. To learn more, check it out!

Note: we will make this feature available in Diigo Chrome extension soon.

In our passion to deliver great value and user experience to our users, Diigo team continues to push the envelope and work hard to develop a whole array of innovative features and products to enhance your productivity for collecting, consuming and collaborating on digital information. Meanwhile, if there are certain premium features that you’d like us to consider, please share your idea with us. Thanks!

Diigo V5.0: Collect, Highlight and Remember!

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With Version 5.0, Diigo moves one step further towards its vision of providing the best cloud-based information management service that enables users to collect, highlight, access and share a variety of information, on a variety of devices.

Since Diigo started as a social bookmarking service four years ago, a major update was released every year for the past four years, each taking Diigo to a new height in terms of enhancing productivity for collecting and consuming digital information. The following chart illustrates the evolution of Diigo very succinctly:

So, what’s new with Diigo 5.0?

  • Diigo 5.0 also enables “Notes”, which is best suited for quick personal memos (via website & new Android app)
  • A new Android phone application called “Diigo Power Note” is being released as a part of Diigo 5.0, which enables Android phone users to collect, organize, sync and access a variety of information such as bookmarks, notes, and pictures. So you can jot down your ideas and thoughts, and take pictures of things you like to be reminded to buy or research later, or business cards handed to you. With Diigo Power Note, you literally have a photographic memory!
  • Web Highlighter for iPad Safari is being released as part of Diigo 5.0, which enables you to highlight and annotate webpages, using fingers, in iPad Safari, just as you can with ebooks on iBooks or Kindle.
  • As with each previous major release, Diigo 5.0 has substantially revamped the user interface for improved look & feel and usability.

There is a lot to explore in the new Diigo. So make sure you check out our new video overview shown above, install the latest toolbar & Chrome extension, try out our new apps on Android, iPad & iPhone, and of course, delve into the new site. Our new HELP is still under active construction. If you’d like to help, love to hear from you, or come join us in our user forum. Ah, bugs reporting – we’ve tried hard to test through the system as thoroughly as possible. Please do let us know if we have overlooked something. Also, let us know your first impression, likes / dislikes, feedback and suggestion. If you like what you see, make sure to help us spread the word!

And of course, last but not least, the entire Diigo team would like to express our most sincere thanks to each and every one of our users and fans, especially those who helped so much in our testing phase, for your time, help, encouragement, suggestions, ideas, and yes, bug reports to help us shape Diigo where it is today.

Thank you, Diigo Community, for your continued support to help us make Diigo better and better!

That’s it for now. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
The entire Diigo team

Best Web sites for Teaching and Learning

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Diigo has been recognized by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) as one of The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, a list of ‘tools and resources of exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning.’

Diigo is listed in the Organizing and Managing Category:

Standards for the 21st-Century Learner:

* 2.1.2 – Organize knowledge so that it is useful.
* 2.1.4 – Use technology and other information tools to analyze and organize information.
* 3.1.4 – Use technology and other information tools to organize and display knowledge and understanding in ways that others can view, use and assess.

We’re honored to be recognized by this organization and community, and support the vision they’ve set forth in the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. If you are not aware of Diigo’s education account phase I, make sure to check it out. To learn more about proper role of technology in education, check out more detail here >>

TigerLogic Corporation Releases Yolink 3.1 With Google Docs and Diigo Integration

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TigerLogic Corporation (Nasdaq: TIGR) just released Yolink 3.1 version with tight integration with Diigo for “Save and Share”: http://www.yolink.com/yolink/press/31_PRESS_RELEASE.pdf

Yolink is a great search tool that gives users the ability to quickly view detailed information that is hidden ‘one-level deep’ behind search results or the links of any website, as well as e-books and text.  Together, we think that Yolink and Diigo are highly synergistic, making a perfect one-two punch that can dramatically improve one’s research productivity.  Check out the combo!

Highlight, Annotate, Archive, Search, Share ~ Diigo ~ the best online research tool just gets even better: Diigo V4 is live now!

~ diigo ~ 22 Comments

Diigo V4 launches today!  Needlessly to say, we are excited that V4 finally gets to say hello to the world!

In our passion to make Diigo the best in its class, we’ve added features, completely revamped the user interfaces, made existing features even easier to use, and come up with what we think you’ll find is an even more incredible platform than before.  Before we give you a peek at all Diigo now has to offer, though,  the entire Diigo team wants to express our most sincere thanks to each and every one of our users and fans, especially those who helped so much in our beta testing phase, for your time, help, encouragement, suggestions, ideas, and yes, bug reports to help us shape Diigo where it is today.  So, in a very real sense, all of you who take an interest in Diigo are a valuable part of the Diigo team, and you have as much reason to be proud of today’s launch of Version 4 as we do.

Thank you, Diigo Community!

Diigo V4 represents Diigo’s continuous effort and commitment to make Diigo the premium online research tool.  As many of you know, Diigo is not merely just another social bookmarking service or a web markup tool. We are developing Diigo to address our personal pain and to help users to better manage the process of discovering, processing, managing, and sharing online information more productively and effectively, so all the features are carefully thought out and seamlessly integrated with personal and team collaboration productivity in mind. We are passionate about making Diigo the best knowledge gathering and sharing platform for individuals, work groups, and companies, organizations, and educators alike.  And we are continuing our relentless pursuit of being a leading innovator in the space and making Diigo the best it can be!

So, what’s new in V4 (click to learn more)?   Building upon the strengths of Diigo V3, version 4 adds significant features, usability and flexibility:

  • New user interface — Users of version 4 enjoy an all-new web interface that reinforces Diigo as a powerful personal and team research tool. The 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. For each snapshot requested (using the full Diigo toolbar in Firefox or Internet Explorer), an HTML version and screenshot are added to the user’s library, and all available versions are presented on a timeline.  This is like building a personal wayback machine of important webpages.   Some examples of uses for this new features are:  archiving of online receipts, promotional ads, client media outreach (for marketing and PR) archiving and reporting, and a wide range of time-progressive reporting of online data.
  • 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. All in all, a highly effective toolset for finding data in Diigo — quickly!
  • 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.

For instance: imagine a group of corporate head hunters looking for job candidates on social networks. These Web “snapshots” can be gathered (even from behind passworded profiles) to aggregate a graphical list of candidates with their qualifications and etc.

  • 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.

This version 4 release of Diigo is a substantial step towards making our service the premier web-based research tool. The collective power ingrained in the Diigo platform to collect, organize, archive, and share knowledge and process like never before, is now improved dramatically and positions Diigo and its users at the threshold of a new collaborative research and knowledge age.

Whether you are a consumer researching products to buy, an individual investor researching stocks on the Internet, a teacher gathering materials, a student group collecting information for a group project, a PR professional collecting client-relevant information, a recruiter scouting for talent, or a workgroup staying on top of competitive intelligence, Diigo can dramatically improve your productivity.

There is a lot to explore in the new Diigo. So make sure you check out our new Take A Tour (complete with V4 tutorial overviews), install the latest toolbar, and of course, delve into the new site.  You can also check out our new Help section (note:  new HELP is still under active construction.  If you’d like to help, love to hear from you!), or come join us in our user forum.  Ah, bugs reporting – we’ve tried hard to test through the system as thoroughly as possible.  Please do let us know if we have overlooked something. Also, let us know your first impression, likes / dislikes, feedback and suggestion. Lastly, if you like what you see, make sure to help us spread the word!

That’s it for now. Enjoy! And thank you for your continued support to help us make Diigo better and better!

Sincerely,
The entire Diigo team