RSS and FURL

Two new (okay, new to me) web based technologies for keeping uptodate and for managing links to resources. Thanks to Paul Pival and Vivian Stieda for getting me started on these. Try them out for yourself and get a feel for how this technology could affect researchers.

Maybe if there was enough interest we could even sponsor a library session? You can let me know you are interested by adding a comment to the end of this message.

RSS
Also called aggregators, these applications are used to keep track of updates on information sources such as blogs.

Of interest to libraries is Ingenta's move to allow RSS tracking of journals--by choosing this service a researcher can keep track of new tables of contents pages, basically an alerting service. More info on this at Resource Shelf.

Paul pointed me to bloglines, a site that allows one to set up a free RSS account.

FURLS
I'd never heard of this one until Vivian sent me a note.

A FURL is a way of centrally locating your booksmarks, and creating an archive of searchable web pages. You can sign up for an account on their web page http://www.furl.net/index.jsp

"Furl is dedicated to making it easy for users to archive, recall, share, and discover useful information on the Web. With a couple clicks, Furl will archive any page. You can easily find it by browsing your personal directory of web pages or by using the full text search that only searches pages you've archived. It's like having your own Google.

Not just limited to archiving pages, Furl also gives you the best ways to share content. Furl makes it easy for your friends to decide which categories of links they are interested in and receive a daily "newsletter" of links. Furl also generates RSS feeds for your links and makes it simple for you to integrate this content into an existing website. "

I tried this with science direct, and was able to bookmark an article, but sadly not to save the entire text in my FURL account. Still, it looks like a great way to centrally manage and store cool articles and web pages.

Drawbacks
-what if the FURL site goes out of business or starts charging, will my archive be lost? -what about the privacy of my links?

Makes creating this kind of service locally seem quite attractive n'est pas?

Let me know what you think.
Helen.