Friday, July 02, 2004
Furl - Your web page filing cabinet
It's interesting what you can find in general surfing. Went to a blog site, looked at an article on how to make wiki's effective (make them easy to use and unconstrained) and I came across Furl. It archives anything you want from the web, and allows you to search it later. Accessible from anywhere, it allows you to indicate what you find useful and want to record, and keeps it handy for you. Cool!
You can also share your entries, or post them in your blog (not entirely certain why I'd want to do that, I am not that egoscentric to thing that others will want to look at the headlines and other web pages I've looked at - but I suppose it's a good way of sharing your interests especially with a smaller group of friends). In this sense, it's a little like the collaborative browsing exploits of a few years ago, but with a little visibility and usefulness to individuals.....
I like the fact that this is another example of a one-man band doing something relatively simple, but doing it well, and doing something that none of the major players have done yet either. In a paper earlier this year, I talked about the supportive browsing system we'd developed here that guided you though pages based on a model of what interested you, and discussed the searching that we could do that biased results with a recency figure - pages you'd seen more recently were considered to be more likely to be the ones you wanted on a common subject.....
The biggest problem I can see is that to be properly useful, anything you think you may want to look up needs to go into furl - and the effort of deciding, and of clicking so often, may be a bit pointless. Why not simply archive everything? (Yes, I know, all that porn/viagra/mistyped urls/90% rubbish sites that are out there - but still.....)
I've signed up for a beta account and will let you know how I get on (in a few weeks, anyway - I can't remember all my accounts and passwords when I'm away from my desk. How do I remember them when I'm at my desk, you ask? Well, there aren't quite post-its stuck everywhere but I have secret pieces of paper with odd scribbles on them, enough to remind me.....) It may be that this takes over from the 'Fragments' folder in my favourites - but I still want more..... but one of the great joys of this job is that I'm paid to think of the 'more' and to do it - so watch this space.....
It's interesting what you can find in general surfing. Went to a blog site, looked at an article on how to make wiki's effective (make them easy to use and unconstrained) and I came across Furl. It archives anything you want from the web, and allows you to search it later. Accessible from anywhere, it allows you to indicate what you find useful and want to record, and keeps it handy for you. Cool!
You can also share your entries, or post them in your blog (not entirely certain why I'd want to do that, I am not that egoscentric to thing that others will want to look at the headlines and other web pages I've looked at - but I suppose it's a good way of sharing your interests especially with a smaller group of friends). In this sense, it's a little like the collaborative browsing exploits of a few years ago, but with a little visibility and usefulness to individuals.....
I like the fact that this is another example of a one-man band doing something relatively simple, but doing it well, and doing something that none of the major players have done yet either. In a paper earlier this year, I talked about the supportive browsing system we'd developed here that guided you though pages based on a model of what interested you, and discussed the searching that we could do that biased results with a recency figure - pages you'd seen more recently were considered to be more likely to be the ones you wanted on a common subject.....
The biggest problem I can see is that to be properly useful, anything you think you may want to look up needs to go into furl - and the effort of deciding, and of clicking so often, may be a bit pointless. Why not simply archive everything? (Yes, I know, all that porn/viagra/mistyped urls/90% rubbish sites that are out there - but still.....)
I've signed up for a beta account and will let you know how I get on (in a few weeks, anyway - I can't remember all my accounts and passwords when I'm away from my desk. How do I remember them when I'm at my desk, you ask? Well, there aren't quite post-its stuck everywhere but I have secret pieces of paper with odd scribbles on them, enough to remind me.....) It may be that this takes over from the 'Fragments' folder in my favourites - but I still want more..... but one of the great joys of this job is that I'm paid to think of the 'more' and to do it - so watch this space.....
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