When you find useful stuff on the web, it can be hard to keep track of it all. You can bookmark it, and in Internet Explorer (or another browser), you assign it to a folder.

Later, you have some memory of a useful website that you found but when you look in a likely folder under your bookmarks there are 50 links. Is it there? It’s hard to be interested enough to find it, so you do another Google search and start over..

I started experimenting with Diigo (www.diigo.com) a few days ago.

Diigo is one of many “social bookmarking” websites but seems to have some handy add ons.

What’s a social bookmarking website anyway? They are websites that let you share interesting websites with friends or colleagues.

What diigo offers which makes it more interesting – even if you aren’t interested in any sharing, is you can:

• highlight a section (or sections) of a webpage
• pin a post it note with your comments
• save it to your Diigo bookmarks with one or more tags

The tags concept lets you create your own categories and later search for the bookmarks under these categories.

It’s a simple solution to the problem that anyone who uses Windows Explorer to store files has found – you can only store a file in one location so later, you might try 5 different places to find what you are looking for. If instead you can tag up a website with a few different keywords you have much more chance of searching for it – and finding it – later.

Here’s an example below:

Commenting on and highlighting a section of a website

If you go to www.diigo.com and sign up you can add the diigo toolbar to IE (or Firefox). The toolbar lets you easily highlight and add your sticky notes or comments to a site – and to review all the websites you have bookmarked.

I’m on diigo as “stevecarson”. I’m going to try it out some more and see how it works for the sharing side..

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