Every year or so, I search for a new way to highlight and annotate text in Web pages. As an IT professional, I am a knowledge worker. So I don’t just read information on Web pages, I work with them. Since Web browsers only allow you to read Web pages, I often convert the more important ones to a PDF and work with them in Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the Reader). There, I can highlight text, create annotations, and search through all my documents, annotations, and highlighted text with ease. However, this method has become obsolete since I found Diigo. Diigo is the most powerful social bookmarking service I’ve ever seen. It has many features and I will introduce some of them in this post.

Actually, I will only discuss the interesting features. Diigo supports common features such as bookmark sharing, tagging, RSS, etc. To take advantage of all of Diigo’s features, you have to install its tool bar. Currently, it supports Firefox and Internet Explorer.

In the headline of this post, I recommended that you forget del.icio.us-and maybe you will follow my advice after you read this post. However, you can still use del.icio.us or your favorite bookmarking service together with Diigo. Its Simultaneous Bookmarking feature allows you to bookmark Web pages on multiple sites with just a mouse click. You can also use the bookmarking feature of your browser together with Diigo. Just in case you follow my advice, you might consider importing your local and your del.icio.us bookmarks into Diigo.

I already mentioned the highlighting feature. This is the feature I like the most. Simply mark text in the Web page and the Diigo context menu will pop-up. If you choose “Bookmark and Highlight,” a new window will open where you can add your tags, comments, etc. (See screenshot.)

Diigo will then highlight the text you marked, which allows you to find this part easily when you access the Web page the next time. This only works if you are logged on to Diigo since all the metadata of the page is stored there.

Diigo distinguishes between comments and sticky notes (annotations). You assign comments to the whole Web page and notes to a highlighted text within a Web page. Your note will show up if the mouse pointer moves over the highlighted text.

Comments, the highlighted text, and notes can also be accesses in the My Bookmarks section on the Diigo Web site. You’ll see them under each bookmark; if you click on “Expand,” you can view the metadata of multiple bookmarks. Just select the bookmarks, click on “More Actions,” and then select “Extra Highlights.”

Bookmarks, comments, and notes can be marked as private or public. “Public” means that every other Diigo user can view them, too. Of course, it doesn’t mean that all readers of this Web page will see them.

However, it is possible to let your friends, who don’t have a Diigo account, view your metadata. You can easily forward Web pages by e-mail. Your friend will get a link, which opens the page with all its highlighting and notes. This works because the page will be loaded from the Diigo proxy, which adds the metadata to the page.

Another great feature of Diigo is its search function. All bookmark services allow you to search within the metadata you added. With Diigo, however, you can also search within the full text of the pages you bookmarked. This way you can create your own full-text database. Of course, you can also restrict your search to your metadata, like the sticky notes, for example.

I want to mention one last feature (this post is already getting too long): the search highlighting. The Diigo tool bar allows you to search in Google and other search engines. If you enable search highlighting, your search term will be highlighted in the Web page. This also works for any open Web page. Just enter the term in the search field of the Diigo tool bar and then click on the highlighting icon.

Okay, this is enough. There are more features, like blog integration, for example. I suggest reading their user guide carefully. Otherwise, you might miss one of the features.

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