Furl - Your Personal Web
Just a couple of days ago I was raving about
Furl to a freind on the train. Furl is:
'...a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages - your Personal Web. Furl offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web, and recommends new Web pages that may interest you. You can also search Furl to find the best sites that other people are saving.'
Will R. has now said that “
Jim Wenzloff has put together a nice primer on
how to get the most out of Furl.” (pdf format) which is great, because I can now also signpost that to explain more about Furl (and Furl the article myself).
Will adds…
“I have to say it's definitely one of my favourite tools on the Web, and more and more I'm finding it to be an invaluable, focused resource for me to mine. Of course it's taken a while to build up the content, but rarely a day goes by that I don't go to my archive to find something that I need. And the best part is just sharing a link to my topics when people ask for resources...”
I totally agree. Furl is also what I use to share resources on the sidebar of this blog so you can see one of the uses it has already. It’s well worth a look and something I’d now be lost without.
February Issue of Info@UK
The
February Issue of Info@UK is now available online.
(Info@UK is a monthly guide to major developments and news on the UK Information Society. It is compiled for the British Council by the Information Management Research Institute at Northumbria University)
February's is a very full issue, and to whet your appetite here’s a quick outline of just
some of the content in each of its main sections:
UK National Developments and News:
Public libraries 24/7 - The first phase of the new People’s Network Service was recently launched to library professionals. ‘The People’s Network Online Enquiry Service will deliver a real-time information service to the public by providing 'live’ access to library and information professionals across the internet…
International Developments and News:
Sharing scholarly materials across the world - This project involves the use of ‘a new internet technology which allows students and faculty around the globe to share their scholarly materials. The technology removes the need for repeated authentication of individual users, whilst protecting their privacy and valuable intellectual property...
Latest World news on the digital divide:
OpenOffice translated into Swahili - This pioneering effort does not only aim to localize free and open source software to the Swahili language, but also create awareness among swahili speakers of the benefits of using and extending open source software.’ One of the activities has been translating OpenOffice.org into Swahili - Jambo OpenOffice…
EU Developments:
Public on-line consultation on eAccessibility - The European Commission ‘has launched a public consultation on how to make the benefits of Information and Communication Technologies available to the widest possible range of citizens, including to older people and people with disabilities...
Research and Innovation News:
Navigable digital books for the blind - The National Library for the Blind (NLB) is running a pilot project, DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System), with Dolphin Audio Publishing. ‘DAISY is a form of electronic book which brings together a number of different formats (text, audio and pictures) into an accessible, navigable digital book…
Internet Resources:
Web resources on FOI - The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has created a list of Web resources on Freedom of Information…
Firefox; a free, open source browser - Firefox is an open source Web browser that is getting rave reviews and is a serious rival to Internet Explorer…
Google digital libraries - Google has set up partnerships with major libraries to digitise parts of their collections and make them available online…
New Publications:
The future of the Internet - A wide-ranging survey of technology leaders, scholars, industry officials, and analysts finds that most internet experts expect attacks on the network infrastructure in the coming decade as the internet becomes more embedded in everyday and commercial life…
The Digital Divide in 2025: an independent study conducted for BT - The report defines digital exclusion as not having access to the internet at home and forecasted the extent of this divide in 2025…
You can access the full articles in their
online newsletter or subscribe to receive a regular copy by email. (Links to some of the featured sites and resources have also been added to my Furl archive).
Search engines are more different than people think
In the sidebar of my blog you should currently see a link to Jux2 (courtesy of some blog design changes that have been taking place around here).
Jux2 is a search tool that compares the results from a number of different search engines by searching Google, Yahoo! And Ask Jeeves simultaneously. They claim:
“If the search engines are providing top results that are very different from each other, then by using only one search engine, Internet searchers are potentially missing relevant results. It stands to reason that searchers will get a better assortment of highly relevant results by searching two engines at once.”
It also has a “What am I missing button” which shows what you are missing by searching only one search engine at a time. If you use Google, for example, it will show you the highest ranked results on Yahoo! that are not among the top results on Google.
Jux2 is still a beta version but the developers are keen to
receive your feedback on its usefulness so have a look and see what you think....
