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Diigo Adds More Research and Collaboration Features

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:30:52 +0000

When Mike reviewed social bookmarking, research and collaboration service Diigo last year, he liked its simplicity, its connections with other services, and its wealth of features. Since then, the social bookmarking field has continued to mature; witness the recent purchase of Friendfeed by Facebook, and the numerous ways that bookmarks can be shared on social networks. Even MySpace is getting into the act by syncing posts with Twitter!

So how can a lesser-known app like Diigo compete? The latest version of Diigo has just gone live, and from what I can tell, it’s growing beyond social bookmarking and going for the “kitchen-sink” approach: Add as many features as possible, so that no matter what a user wants, it’ll be there. Among the list of new features are a few that caught my eye:

Similar to Iterasi, users can now archive web pages from a particular point in time — even ones that are dynamically generated or password-protected. Multiple versions of the same page can be saved, either as HTML or images. Toolbars to control this function are available for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
There are now several options for commenting on web pages — highlighting in multiple colors, and different sizes of sticky notes, all of which can be private or shared.
Links to the archived and annotated web pages can be shared via email, Twitter or Facebook, and recipients don’t need any special software to see your comments.
Groups can be set up to comment, tag and collaborate on projects.

The site is still in beta, but its redesigned interface is intuitive. Searching and tagging have also been improved, and an iPhone app is on the way. The site is free and advertising-supported; educational accounts are available.

Oh, and by the way, Diigo is one of the few sites I’ve seen that offers an explanation of its name:

Diigo is pronounced as “Dee’go.” The name “Diigo” is an abbreviation for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.”

If Diigo’s impressive feature list hasn’t convinced you to try it, I’m sure that will!

Have you tried Diigo?

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PositivePress: Archive and Share the Web

Charles Hamilton — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:00:29 +0000

The folks at Iterasi (covered previously on WWD) launched a product today that combines tools for archiving web sites with some slick ones for sharing the contents of your archive with others.

The new service, called PositivePress, is intended to overcome the transitory nature of the web by making a permanent and fully functional archive of selected sites that can then be shared. In order to make this happen, PositivePress has three main features.

Capture. PositivePress users can capture ongoing information streams from any web site that has an RSS feed. Each feed can be matched with keywords so that, for example, one could collect all mentions of Microsoft that appear in Yahoo News. Sites without RSS feeds can be captured manually, and Iterasi is apparently working on a system that will allow such sites to be collected on a regular basis. Iterasi has tweaked the system so that sites that rely on offsite elements (avatars, for example, or images hosted on picture hosts) won’t break when archived. The service will also resolve any shortened URLs to the original full URL, a useful feature in light of the recent threatened shutdown of URL shortening service Tr.im. PositivePress does not archive videos, however.
Archive. Once sites have been captured, they can be viewed and searched, using what amounts to a custom search engine.
Report. PositivePress includes a slick tool for sharing results from the archive by email. Users can create emails (with their own branding) that can be sent to individuals or groups. Sites can be annotated, and links in the emails go back to the archive, and also to the original URL of the site. The service includes reports laying out how often the emails are viewed and other related statistics.

The service is aimed at advertising agencies, consultants and marketers within larger organizations, and others who need to collect business intelligence over time, although Iterasi has other types of users, ranging from law enforcement agencies to universities. PositivePress is compatible with all operating systems and most browsers (although not IE 6, which is an interesting choice, given the service’s mainly corporate clientele).

Pricing for the new service is variable, depending on how many clients, feeds and pages a user wishes to track. Package costs range from $99 to $699 per month. The existing free Iterasi service isn’t going away, however. It is being rebranded as Iterasi Personal, and its 10,000-plus users will still be able to use the service to collect and share web pages.

Do you use Iterasi? Will you and your clients find the new service useful?

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Iterasi Adds Mac Support and More

Mike Gunderloy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:00:00 +0000

We first looked at Iterasi when it was launched at this year’s spring DEMO conference. At the time, we were favorably impressed with this tool for saving live snapshots of web pages in an online account, but we were a bit disappointed with the lack of cross-platform support. Well, we can get over our disappointment: Iterasi now supports both the PC and the Mac (OS X 10.5+), as well as IE7 and Firefox 2 and 3 – opening up its use to many more web workers.

The other significant new feature in this release is a scheduler to do periodic captures of a web page to your account (assuming your computer is running). This gives you another way to track changes on sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Still in beta, Iterasi remains free to download and use.

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