Yule Heibel had been off my radar since she withdrew from bloggaria some time ago. We had a brief email exchange, and in May she treated me to a beta trial of Writely, but her blog was shuttered. I’ve been cleaning up links. I clicked through to Yule, and I’m happy to say that she has become active again on her public blog. If you go there now, you may learn more about the fifty year old lamb, or the sexual nature of architecture in Victoria. Or why, if your brain hurts, you must have it out.

And here… here is a free link to a surprising place that though it has a webbly too oh design, all rounded corners and shit, also has an interesting premise… “a new way to find people who don’t suck.” There is no way to tie this to my delight at finding Yule back again, except the implicit association of Yule with people who don’t suck, and perhaps the revelation that I found it looking for the ex-Cleese-iastical origins of the thought that if your brains hurts, etc.

Yule’s brief appearance…

image copyright george schelling

Yule Heibel, via email to several smart and influential people and to me, sends information regarding Diigo, an annotational Web 2.0 thingie, that sort of combines the power of del.icio.us with the messiness of sticky-notes.

Yule says,

I learned of them when I read about their service in the MIT Technology Review several weeks ago.  It’s by invite only, but I wrote and told them that they had to give me an account because last September I was emailing tech-savvy friends to ask if anyone could design a service exactly like this.  I was willing to pay for this — like flickr or Mars Edit — but diigo is in fact free.  No one took up my offer back in September, but by cosmic coincidence some electronic engineering professor geek at Berkeley was dreaming about the same thing and designed it.

What it does is this: you read something on the web, you bookmark it using diigo.com (you do need to install a little diigo bookmarklet on the toolbar).  You assign a tag to it (if you want), or several.  Then, you can literally underline the passages that intrigue you, and — this is the cool bit I’ve been waiting for — you can add a “sticky” note (just like on flickr) that associates with the part you’ve just underlined.  When you look at your bookmarks, the list will show you how many annotations you have in each article you’ve bookmarked, and you can then expand that list to show you both the underlined bits as well as your “notes.”

Then she (almost gleefully) notes,

Further, if you are a blogger (which I am no longer, thanks), you can blog your annotated and commented-upon bits directly to your blog.  Or you can badger your friends with your brilliant insights to that last political science article you read by forwarding your diigo-bookmarked articles…  Whatever.

She has a couple dozen beta memberships to give away.  If you want one, drop her a note directly or comment here expressing interest and I’ll pass it on to Yule.