I’m in Atlanta for a few days before heading back home on Monday night to get back to my routine. I’ve got over 300 posts accumulating in my Bloglines account under the edblogger section, and more and more of it seems to be worthy of thinking and saving and writing about. It’s no doubt going to get harder and harder to stay abreast of all of it.
And I mean what does it say when Bloglines makes Time’s 50 Coolest Websites list? Cool indeed. Now we need them to recognize Furl, which, by the way, Greg Ritter has done a great overview of:
But now I’m hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a “Furl It!” bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you’ve highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.
If that’s not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they’ve just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings — found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone’s public Furl bookmarks.
All these great tools in our arsenal to play with and learn from, getting more and more recognition. It’s part of what made NECC so heady and motivating. People are starting to get it. They’re starting to see what we’ve been seeing for a couple of years now, and that no doubt means that all of these technologies are going to be pushed even more by teachers and students which in turn means a lot more great ideas and discoveries and tools ahead. I still find it amazing that I have just as much enthusiasm today (if not more) as I did when I first started playing over three years ago. What a very fun ride…
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