Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
It is entirely possible that I have tried every bookmarking service invented. It is the top tech headache on my list that has never been adequately solved. I promise you, if it exists, I’ve tried it. Some last longer than others – Yoono hung around for a bit, Del.icio.us went out the door very quickly, and NetRocket got me briefly excited – but none has exhibited staying power. Generally speaking, these services put too much focus on the social aspect and neglect to solve the basic problem – helping me find and work with my bookmarks quickly and easily. Will the recently upgraded Diigo, which initially launched at DEMOfall 07, prove to be the answer to my bookmarking headaches? Time will tell. One thing is for sure: with a slate of features that covers most every issue in the bookmarking/sharing/highlighting game, this service is sure to have something for everyone.
At first glance, Diigo seems all over the map. The service offers bookmarking, highlighting of text within a page, commenting on a site for others to see, sending options, groups for networking and much more. To label it as a simple bookmark service would be unfair; it’s much more than that and could very well emerge as an oft-used research tool in my browser (that would be Tech Headache #2 on my list.) There’s much I like about the service and a few things I dislike. Though initially overwhelming, Diigo has been made as user friendly as possible by its developers. The multitude of features could easily kludge up a site but the Diigo team has made quick work of them. It’s design and UI are top-notch – so much so that I recommended Diigo to another company as an excellent example of creating elegance out of chaos. I do wish the search function was a bit deeper and more robust; if a bookmark isn’t explicitly tagged, search doesn’t find it. For a bookmarking service to truly work its way into my heart, I need a better search. For more detailed reviews of the product itself, check out Web Worker Daily and Webware.
What I find most interesting about Diigo is precisely what turns some off: the scope. This is one of the most full-featured and in-depth Web 2.0 products I’ve seen in a long time. Rather than focus on one headache of the social Web, the company is aiming to solve seemingly all of them. Ironically, one of my bugaboos in startups is a company who casts too wide a net. Pick a target market or two and laser in, I always say. When it comes to this space though – the collecting of online content for future use – I think some aggregation is overdue. The myriad services dedicated to this purpose all have their upsides, but in general only end up adding to the noise. If I can depend on one site for all my bookmarking and clipping needs, that will significantly reduce the clutter in my tool bar. From my experience so far, it’s looking like that site will be Diigo.
