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Beta Review - diigo social bookmarking and annotation service

diigo Logo A few weeks back I managed to score an invite to a new social bookmarking/annontation site called diigo. I am quite excited by the potential of a service such as this and its really starting to realise some of the oppourtunity out there. Essentially diigo lets you bookmark pages, tag those bookmarks, add comments to those bookmarks, highlight content within pages, add comments to those pages that are viewable by all diigo users and utilise all the community features your used to like subscribing to your friends lists.

Thats not a list of features that springs out of the page, many of these ideas have been attempted previously. Its more the deftness that diigo handles these ideas with that makes it stand out from the pack. Theres also the fact that its all bundled into one service.

diigo provides a toolbar for FireFox, Flock and IE. With the toolbar installed you can bookmark, tag, annotate pages as well as view what others have said about a page. Rather cleverly diigo have also realised that people are really fed up with toolbars so they’ve got a very clever bookmarklet, which is what I have been using in FireFox 1.5.x. More after the jump…

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ajaxSketch - Review

I covered ajaxWrite a few posts ago and there will be a more detailed review coming up. But until then I thought I’d give you a quick run through of ajaxSketch. ajaxSketch is essentially a web based version of inkscape (or Illustrator as the devs claim). For the purpose of this review I’m going to discount the critiscism I aimed at ajaxWrite, specifically the lack of collaborative features. So this is squarely focused on the functionality and limited within the scope of the application.

So essentially ajaxSketch is a simple image creation tool. Its not aiming to compete with something like photoshop or necessary Inkscape (despite the claims of the site). As far as I am concerned the only use I can see for this is for quickly knocking up some graphs or other simple images that use rudimentary shapes.

When I first heard about ajaxSketch I actually got quite excited. The main reason for this was the fact that SVG was being used to handle all of the graphical legwork. I’ve long been an advocate of SVG and still feel its been underutilised and misunderstood to a certain extent. Of course the lack of support and public awareness are two major hurdles that need to be overcome. In fact I utilised SVG as part of my Final Year Project whilst studying for my degree, and boy did it serve me well. The ability to add scripted events to objects inline and the object orientated approach were huge bonuses.

So how well does ajaxSketch live up to my expectations? (more…)

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