Diigo review

You can use Diigo to add Sticky Notes to a Web page. As long as you're logged in to Diigo, the notes appear when you mouse over highlighted text associated with them.

How can you find the good stuff in your bundle of bookmarks? Diigo's advanced search lets you scour the text of pages you've bookmarked--not just the basic titles, tags, and URLs that Del.icio.us goes through--as well as your own highlights and comments. So if you forgot to tag that jambalaya recipe, a Diigo search for "shrimp" should do the trick. And your tag cloud, à la Del.ico.us, shows the most-used topics. As with Del.icio.us, click any tag to see bookmarks that you and other users have made. At this point, many popular Web sites haven't been bookmarked by many Diigo users. Still, Del.icio.us users are migrating to Diigo; one of its most popular tags is imported:del.icio.us.

As with other services, it's too bad Diigo doesn't offer a way to cull duplicate tags, such as "recycle," "recycled," and "recycling," although you can manually merge them. If you haven't conscientiously tagged your content over time, you'll still have to clean up a mess--but we haven't yet found a bookmarking tool that's solved this problem. And we wish Diigo would autofill as we typed our search query.

Unfortunately, Diigo isn't a finished product, and we ran into glitches. Once you do a search on, say, "hybrid," you're supposed to be able to click Diigo's Subscribe link to get updates whenever someone adds the "hybrid" tag to some content. Unfortunately, this button was disabled during our tests, as new subscription features were under construction. Also, Firefox crashed when we tried to forward a highlighted Web page. Other times, the same action worked without a problem.

Diigo's help includes user forums as well as tips and a no-nonsense flash tutorial. We found the feature descriptions helpful, but we couldn't find any way to contact the vendor for questions.

Judging by common bookmark tags, such as "Web 2.0," the Diigo community is full of tech-savvy users. Still, we find it straightforward enough that a dedicated bookmarking newbie shouldn't have a problem adopting Diigo as a research companion. Diigo is great for taking notes on Web pages and using them to collaborate with other users--and since we started using Diigo, we've lost our appetite for Del.icio.us.