Diigo

...is an application that lets you highlight portions of a web page and/or add annotations to a web page. This is a great tool when you are doing online legal research, as the usual requirement of saving a page locally or importing to a editing program such as MS Word and then highlighting important or useful passages is removed. Plus (and this is the best part) you can add a comment to any highlighted section of text - a feature which removes the frustration of traditional online research where you either have had to print the document out and then highlight and annotate it, or try to annotate within in the document somehow.

The Diigo application is downloadable as a toolbar for both Firefox and Explorer. Once installed, the toolbar looks like this:

When you first install the toolbar, you are prompted to create an account on the Diigo web site which then creates a page for you linking to all of the pages you’ve bookmarked using the Toolbar:

A nice feature of the diigo website is that it also allows you to import existing links into its bookmark list, giving you access to all of your research links from any Internet-connected computer.

The Diigo app lets you bookmark any page you are on by clicking on the blue D on left side of the toolbar, once the page has been bookmarked a red book is shown overlaying the blue D. By configuring the bookmark function you can have the bookmark created in both your local bookmark folder and on the Diigo website under your account (as well as a host of other social bookmarking sites)

The highlight and annotate functions are what makes Diigo great. When you come across a section of text that is useful, you just select the text, right-click, and select Diigo | Highlight from the context menu.

The highlighting then appears on the webpage whenever you return to it:

So far so good. Now, to add a comment you simply hover your mouse over the highlighted text and select ‘add a sticky note’. At this point a window will appear prompting you to type in your comment. Once you’ve added the note it will appear each time you visit the page when you hover your mouse over a piece of highlighted text:

Tagging is a process of adding special identifying words to each of your bookmarked pages. For instance, when doing research for a paper on, oh I don’t know, say the difficulties of online legal research, if I find an interesting webpage, I would tag it as ‘1032’, ‘paper’, ‘“legal research”‘, and so on. Later on when I’m gathering all of my research together, I can immediately narrow down the bookmarked pages I’m interested in to those which have been tagged as both ‘1032’ and ‘paper’, which excludes pages I’ve bookmarked relating to other aspects of the class, and also excludes pages I’ve tagged as ‘paper’ for other classes.

These tags are listed on your Diigo bookmarks page and are sortable by frequency or alpha-numerically, and as a list or cloud (If you choose ‘cloud’ the more popular tags are displayed as larger and darker)

Searching your bookmarked pages is another feature that is possible from your Diigo account. The search feature allows you to search across tags, the full text of any bookmarked page, or the comments added to a highlighted portion of text. In the example below I searched for “Diigo is great” which was part of a comment I had made on a highlighted passage:

Blogging is also possible from the Diigo Toolbar. This doesn’t really apply to the utility of the tool with regard to online legal research(although I suppose you could post all of your highlighted passages to a blog as a means of keeping them in one place) but I have developed a compulsion to mention as many ways as possible to post to the same blog account.

Any page that has had highlighting applied to it can be posted to a blog using the Diigo application. The resulting post commences with a link to the source page, and contains both the highlighted text regions (which are no longer highlighted) and any comments which have been applied to a highlighted section

Feature is alright, but there are no breaks inserted to show where one highlighted segment ends and a new one begins, and the comments are discernable only by the insertion of the name of the commenter at the end of a comment.